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Page Rank is not a particularly impressive algorithm. The technical leap that Google made was the idea of having outgoing links be a proxy for authority, and it

by lmkg 17y ago

Page Rank is not a particularly impressive algorithm. The technical leap that Google made was the idea of having outgoing links be a proxy for authority, and it was an innovative and useful observation. Page Rank is about the second-simplest implementation of that concept (the first-simplest would not have the dampening factor). It's just a glorified eigenvector problem. Page Rank is not impressive for being a significant technical breakthrough. In fact, I think Page Rank is more impressive for not being a technical breakthrough. Google came up with a single good idea, and even a very very simple application of that idea had significant practical benefit.

wheels 17y ago
Actually, no PageRank wasn't even the first web search algorithm to do that. HITS, by Jon Kleinberg was the first rigorous formulation of that notion (which is mentioned in the article) and was cited in the original PageRank paper. It was widely known at the time that it was a concept imported from library science for correlation in co-citation patterns.
- zandorg 17y ago
  That happens a lot. Someone invents something at the same time as another guy. One of these guys has some VC or Angel cash. Guess who succeeds most?
  - wheels 17y ago
    Uhm, Jon Kleinberg is an academic (one of computer science's finest) and was clearly cited in the PageRank paper. He's authored seminal publications across several sub-fields of computer science, he's in a named chair in an Ivy League university, and laid the foundations for modern web search. I'd say he's been pretty successful for a guy in his 30s. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/
vinutheraj 17y ago
I may have misunderstood you, but isn't a node with a lot of outgoing links said to be a hub and a node with a lot of incoming links said to be an authority ? source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
- lmkg 17y ago
  Yeah, sorry, my mistake. I think "a page where lots of other pages have outgoing links pointed at it" was what ran through my head... but that's what "lots of incoming links" means. Too late to edit!

by lmkg 17y ago

wheels 17y ago

Actually, no PageRank wasn't even the first web search algorithm to do that. HITS, by Jon Kleinberg was the first rigorous formulation of that notion (which is mentioned in the article) and was cited in the original PageRank paper. It was widely known at the time that it was a concept imported from library science for correlation in co-citation patterns.

zandorg 17y ago
That happens a lot. Someone invents something at the same time as another guy. One of these guys has some VC or Angel cash. Guess who succeeds most?
- wheels 17y ago
  Uhm, Jon Kleinberg is an academic (one of computer science's finest) and was clearly cited in the PageRank paper. He's authored seminal publications across several sub-fields of computer science, he's in a named chair in an Ivy League university, and laid the foundations for modern web search. I'd say he's been pretty successful for a guy in his 30s. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/

vinutheraj 17y ago

I may have misunderstood you, but isn't a node with a lot of outgoing links said to be a hub and a node with a lot of incoming links said to be an authority ? source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

lmkg 17y ago
Yeah, sorry, my mistake. I think "a page where lots of other pages have outgoing links pointed at it" was what ran through my head... but that's what "lots of incoming links" means. Too late to edit!