Google and the importance of national research funding

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[From Dave Farber's Iper list.  Some excerpts- BSA]

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=71217

Google: Lessons for America's Innovation Policy

The press has gone gaga over Google - the world's most popular Internet
search engine.  With its upcoming IPO, every aspect of the company's
business strategy and quirky culture has been scrutinized. One issue that
has received almost no attention, however, is the important role that
federal research policy has played in creating Google and other Internet
companies. Past federal investments have allowed the United States to
establish a commanding lead in the Internet and other advanced technologies.


What is not widely known is the contribution that federal research funding
played in creating Google. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergei Brin
- two computer science graduate students at Stanford University. Stanford
was one of a number of universities that received funding under the "Digital
Libraries Initiative" - supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA,
and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (DARPA is the agency that
funded the ARPANET in the late 1960's, the computer network that led to
today's Internet). The goal of the initiative, launched in 1994, was to
"dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information
in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and
processing via communication networks - all in user-friendly ways." Larry
Page was funded under the DLI as a graduate student researcher, and Sergei
Brin was supported with an NSF graduate student fellowship. Page and other
Stanford researchers created an algorithm called PageRank. It ranks the
importance of each Web page based on the number and importance of other Web
pages that link to it. This technological advance enabled Page and Brin to
develop a search engine that found useful and relevant information, which
was critical to Google's popularity. Google was also prototyped on equipment
paid for by the federal government's Digital Library Initiative.

Google is not the only search engine with roots in university research.
Inktomi was founded in 1996 by University of California-Berkeley computer
science professor Eric Brewer and his graduate student Paul Gauthier.
Inktomi's technology was based on a DARPA-funded project called Network of
Workstations, which allowed researchers to create low-cost supercomputers by
networking together inexpensive PCs. Inktomi has recently been acquired by
Yahoo, and Microsoft is licensing Inktomi's technology for its search
engine.

This kind of innovation is critical to economic growth and job creation.
Google, for example, has gone from eight employees in the beginning of 1999
to almost 2,000 today.  Unfortunately, the federal government isn't making
the kinds of investments today that will ensure that the United States
maintains its leadership in the industries of the future. 

Our failure to invest in research and a high-tech workforce is a big
mistake. If we want to see more Googles, faster growth, and more job
creation, we should significantly increase our funding for science and
education. 



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