Americans believe that the individual can influence the future by personal effort, but since there are too many variables in the distant future, we favor a short-term view.
The company's algorithm draws on information from more than 100 databases and social networks, looking at an array of variables such as users' locations and the number of personal connections.
This cliquey if democratic approach was later augmented by other algorithms that weight sites by other variables--news sites get a higher ranking than a 16-year-old's personal Web log.