Collective Mind by Vasily Klyukin Read Free Book Online Page A

He told her about his inventions and the
problems he had making progress with them, and she listened closely and
encouraged her brother, and wouldn’t let him give up. And Vicky used to laugh
and say that he was her very best girlfriend, who wouldn’t even look at the
same boy as she.
    Isaac
felt a need to think about something different, because sooner or later his
thoughts about Vicky would come to the time when she fell ill. He drove away
his memories and went back to the data base.
    Isaac
focused on another famous name, the inventor of the unique search engine
“Piquet”. Johnson Pike lived in Beverly Hills and was a very rich man. He got
rich after launching his search engine, with a totally new approach to the
analysis of results.
    The
usual search engines were focused on the amount of site traffic, and a lot of
traffic automatically made a site important and ranked it high in the ratings.
In the first lines of the located data, users saw the most popular sites, not
the reference that they needed. The information they were looking for was
either hidden away somewhere in the last pages, or was never even located at
all.
    Piquet
was better and faster at finding results for given search parameters. The
algorithm for the results of analysis was complicated and, of course, wasn’t
made public. Specialists assumed that the search engine analyzed all the words
on each site found. If there were too many words, that meant it wasn’t a
professional site, but some kind of encyclopedia, news portal or resource page.
Piquet assigned credibility to sites on the basis of the frequency of the
search words relative to the total number and the presence of specific,
strictly professional terms and phrases. At least, that was what the manual
claimed. Paranoiacs claimed that the search engine also analyzed the files on
the computer of the user who launched a search, in order to figure out what he
did and rank the results more accurately.
    Apart
from everything else, Pike was a superb PR man. In his numerous interviews
about the search engine and his company, the inventor frequently toyed with the
journalists, only talking about what he wanted and cracking jokes, including
dirty ones. At one press conference he put eight penguins in the front row, and
he arrived to another wearing an astronaut’s suit. In the first case he
announced that he wanted to see a decently dressed audience at the conference,
and in the second case that he had been searching for an answer to a very
difficult question out in space – and found it. The journalists loved and hated
him at the same time. On the one hand, he was rude, but Pike only attacked
people in response to an attack, never overstepping a thin boundary line, plus
he threw fantastic parties, at which he was always very hospitable and
generous. In any case, he was a newsmaker, and no one quarreled with him
openly. After all, tomorrow he might block your name in his search engine, and
you would instantly be consigned to journalistic oblivion.
    Late
last year the extravagant Pike had put on yet another show, in which he jumped
off the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles—into the sunset—on a yellow
hang-glider with “Search in Piquet” written on it. And five big stars. The
journalists outdid each other in inventing catchy headlines. A superb banquet
was laid out for them on the roof. The next day the wings of the bright-yellow
hang-glider appeared on the front pages of all the major newspapers and news
sites.
    Everybody
was really surprised when Pike announced he had decided to download his
creativity. At the test session, to which he invited the press, he said that
his creativity level was off the scale and declared emotionally that from now
on his imagination would serve the good of society.
    However,
before offloading his energy, he was required to hand over the Piquet algorithm
to the company’s board of directors and wind up all activities that required
intellectual energy. In the table