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CHAPTER THREE: Catalogs<br />

In the fall of 2002, Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled<br />

as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York.<br />

His major at RPI was information technology. Though he is not a programmer,<br />

in October Jesse decided to begin to tinker with search engine<br />

technology that was available on the RPI network.<br />

RPI is one of America’s foremost technological research institutions.<br />

It offers degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering<br />

to information sciences. More than 65 percent of its five<br />

thousand undergraduates finished in the top 10 percent of their high<br />

school class. The school is thus a perfect mix of talent and experience<br />

to imagine and then build, a generation for the network age.<br />

RPI’s computer network links students, faculty, and administration<br />

to one another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available<br />

on the RPI network is available on the Internet. But the network<br />

is designed to enable students to get access to the Internet, as well as<br />

more intimate access to other members of the RPI community.<br />

Search engines are a measure of a network’s intimacy. Google<br />

48<br />

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