How to Function in a Linkless World

TheAtlantic.com has a very interesting article called Inside the Google Books Algorithm. The author, Alexis Madrigal, writes ...

We have come to depend on Google to give us exactly what we want.

But what about when the company has to reach outside the web? The printed volumes represented on Google Books form a completely different kind of problem. Google's famous algorithm can't be deployed to search through books because they don't link to each other in the way that webpages do. There is no perfect BookRank corollary for PageRank.

All of which made me wonder: How does Google Books work? What makes it tick? It turns out that it's actually a great place for the company's engineers to learn how to function in a linkless, physical world.

I must confess, I've never thought about it this way.

How to function in a linkless, physical world? Interesting. But is the physical world really linkless?

Aren't stories, for example, shared links? When we tell stories in our community, don't we share links to events, places and other objects through storytelling? Interesting. I have to think about it ...