

The Italian Man Who Inspired Google Web Search - sc90
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-15/meet-the-italian-man-who-beat-google-to-web-search-and-gave-it-away-for-free-.html

======
Brakenshire
> After the speech, Marchiori returned home in the hopes of realizing his
> ambitious design. "When I came back to Italy, I asked the university for
> 20,000 euros to develop a search engine, but instead, they financed a
> project about the history of copper metallurgy in Italy," he says.
> Meanwhile, Page got his first $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-
> founder Andy Bechtolsheim. A spokeswoman for Google in Milan declined to
> comment.

------
riquito
"Volunia", the search engine he worked on a couple years ago, was... peculiar.
The marketing point was that whenever you browsed you were able to chat with
other people viewing the same site. How did they achieve that? Clicking a link
in Volunia would open the desired site in a fullscreen iframe.

The result was that

1) you would end up on white pages for any site that blocked iframe access

2) you would loose the navigation bar, since the domain was stuck to
Volunia.com

3) they were able to see your whole navigation history since you were browsing
inside their iframe.

In a second iteration they proposed a Firefox extension to avoid the above
problems but... who would install an extension to use a search engine? How
could you explain it to non savvy users?

A positive thing was the SimCity like interface (you could see a site like a
building linked by roads to other buildings). That was funny at first, yet I
can't remember what they wanted to achieve with that.

~~~
gone35
The execution was frankly abhorrent to say the least; and I personally
couldn't care less about all that gimmicky 'social' cruft; _but_ , having just
watched a demo of the thing [1], I must say I'm having a slight mini Xerox
Parc-ish feeling about the map navigation stuff, which is after all a key part
of Marchiori's original vision [2].

Paraphrasing an earlier reviewer [3], I feel this guy is definitely onto
something here...

[1] Starts at 0:51: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Mxlb-
Gqhs&t=0m51s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Mxlb-Gqhs&t=0m51s)

[2] [http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/2012/left-
volunia](http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/2012/left-volunia)

[3] [http://searchengineland.com/volunia-a-social-search-
engine-s...](http://searchengineland.com/volunia-a-social-search-engine-says-
the-web-has-come-alive-110462)

------
smoyer
Does anyone else think the tone of the article is strongly implying Marchiori
is owed honor, fame, money etc while his quote contradicts the implication?
"Munchausen by Proxy" is a recognized syndrome but I've read several articles
lately that sound like "Sour Grapes by Proxy".

~~~
adventured
It's all tied up in the mythologization of ideas.

I've found it's extremely common even for business writers to regularly buy
into the notion that ideas are the critical element in success. That spark
point is endlessly romanticized, whether we're talking about Newton's apple or
Pierre's pez. There _is_ something a bit romantic about that moment of
clarity, but it's such an insignificant fraction of the work, luck and timing
that goes into success as to be absurd to grant much value to it.

~~~
modeless
I couldn't agree more. I'm looking for some pithy name for this fallacy so I
can more easily point it out when I see it. It's exactly this sort of thing
that leads people to believe that e.g. the patent system is a good idea.

------
middleclick
Interesting article. It says that he gets a salary of $3,000. This comes out
to be about 2100 EUR. I am not familiar with the cost of living in Italy but
it doesn't sound much?

~~~
johansch
Italy has surprisingly low salary levels for a "developed" european country.

[http://www.italymagazine.com/italy/business/wages-italy-
amon...](http://www.italymagazine.com/italy/business/wages-italy-amongst-
lowest-europe)

~~~
davidw
I think if Italy got a few things worked out a bit better (the justice system,
for one), that it'd be a good place to get good developers on the cheap. I
know just as many bright people here in Padova as I did in San Francisco, and
they work for a hell of a lot cheaper.

------
johnrob
_Just give me an Internet connection and, above all, some time to think._

So true, so simple, and yet at times so hard to obtain.

------
ojbyrne
I read this book in the early 90s:

[http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-
Classification...](http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-
Classification-Cataloging/dp/019509395X)

The gist of it was that the "value" of a scholarly article could be measured
by the number of citations, weighted by the number of citations each of the
articles that cited it got, and so on.

Basically PageRank (though without the actual mathematics that to calculate
the number).

~~~
mtdewcmu
New ideas are often just old ideas applied to new problems.

------
palominoz
i can say he was a good professor for me during my university years, and i am
in some way proud of reading about him here. he is really a nice person with
all his students, he doesnt care about grades or other things

------
jkldotio
Massimo Franceschet's 2010 paper "PageRank: Standing on the shoulders of
giants" lists some fascinating historical precursors to PageRank.[0][1][2]

[0]
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858v3.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858v3.pdf)
(pdf)

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858](http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858) (arxiv)

[2]
[http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cites=11605628719410021...](http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cites=11605628719410021927&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en)
(citation network, 60 citations)

[3] Massimo Marchiori's 1997 paper for comparison
[http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/](http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/)

*Edited

------
atmosx
Well, the title is a bit pompous and takes too much for granted.

That said, I respect Mr. Marchioni, especially for his last quote in the
article. I feel the same way, even though I'm not able to create a Google-
level search engine :-)

~~~
eng_monkey
Actually it is Dr Marchioni (or Prof). He holds a Ph.D. in Computational
Mathematics and Computer Science.

~~~
davidw
Since we're being pedantic, it's Marchiori, not Marchioni :-)

Sergio Marchionne is the head of Fiat/Chrysler.

------
dang
Can anyone suggest a less baity title?

~~~
johnrob
Meet the Italian Man Who Inspired Google Web Search

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll use that. Thanks! (I took out "Meet", though, since that's also a
linkbait gimmick.)

