When google finally gets its gargantuan market capitalization later this year, it will turn its founders into billionaires and make individual investors everywhere swoon. But it will also validate an idea: The most valuable resource on the Internet is the collective intelligence of everyone who uses it. Google has succeeded for a simple reason: It regularly finds the Web pages that are most valuable and puts them at the top of the list. The heart of the technology that lets it do this is the PageRank algorithm (after cofounder Larry E. Page), which essentially asks Web page producers to vote on which other pages are most worthwhile. Each link to a page counts as a vote. Google is a republic, rather than a pure democracy; sites that have more links into them are effectively given more voting power. But the principle is fundamentally democratic―let the masses decide. Given the Wild West nature of the Web, you'd think that this would lead to chaos or irrationality. Instead, it leads to a remarkable order.
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