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PageRank still "learned" from the data, and it wouldn't be able to do that without a ton of data. So while the data wasn't the most important thing to get Googl

by tensor 10y ago

PageRank still "learned" from the data, and it wouldn't be able to do that without a ton of data. So while the data wasn't the most important thing to get Google off the ground, it was arguably equally important as the algorithm. Though as others have said, after the start gun went off, a lot of other factors came into play because PageRank, like other algorithms, is easily gamed on it's own.

IshKebab 10y ago
PageRank doesn't learn from the data. It just calculates metrics on the data. It's totally different from Machine Learning.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  It's definitely different from supervised learning. However, I think you could make a case for being some sort of form of unsupervised learning and it's not as though there's a codified list of what is "Machine Learning" and what isn't.
  - stdbrouw 10y ago
    Well, in that case calculating the sample mean of a dataset is machine learning too. So is sorting a list alphabetically. Regardless of whether it's supervised or unsupervised, how can you speak of machine learning if the metric is fixed before seeing any data? PageRank is human learning: people look at a bunch of pages they want categorized, figure out an intuitively appealing way to categorize them, and then encode those rules in an algorithm. Edit: after thinking about this a bit more, I guess you could in fact think of e.g. k-means clustering as just a very advanced form of descriptive statistics, perhaps not fundamentally different from calculating a mean or a kernel density estimate. And in that sense PageRank would be unsupervised learning too, but it still feels to me like that's obscuring rather than clarifying how it works?
mattkrause 10y ago
It's not obvious that the data came from AOL or Yahoo. The initial papers describe Brin and Page's attempts to design their own web crawler. Google collecting the data itself, instead of getting it from an incumbent, undermines the article's thesis quite a bit. That said, one interpretation of the PageRank model is of a user randomly clicking from page to page, occasionally giving up and starting over. AOL would have access to data like this, which might help them refine the "damping" term in the PageRank model.

by tensor 10y ago

IshKebab 10y ago

PageRank doesn't learn from the data. It just calculates metrics on the data. It's totally different from Machine Learning.

mattkrause 10y ago
It's definitely different from supervised learning. However, I think you could make a case for being some sort of form of unsupervised learning and it's not as though there's a codified list of what is "Machine Learning" and what isn't.
- stdbrouw 10y ago
  Well, in that case calculating the sample mean of a dataset is machine learning too. So is sorting a list alphabetically. Regardless of whether it's supervised or unsupervised, how can you speak of machine learning if the metric is fixed before seeing any data? PageRank is human learning: people look at a bunch of pages they want categorized, figure out an intuitively appealing way to categorize them, and then encode those rules in an algorithm. Edit: after thinking about this a bit more, I guess you could in fact think of e.g. k-means clustering as just a very advanced form of descriptive statistics, perhaps not fundamentally different from calculating a mean or a kernel density estimate. And in that sense PageRank would be unsupervised learning too, but it still feels to me like that's obscuring rather than clarifying how it works?

mattkrause 10y ago

It's not obvious that the data came from AOL or Yahoo. The initial papers describe Brin and Page's attempts to design their own web crawler. Google collecting the data itself, instead of getting it from an incumbent, undermines the article's thesis quite a bit. That said, one interpretation of the PageRank model is of a user randomly clicking from page to page, occasionally giving up and starting over. AOL would have access to data like this, which might help them refine the "damping" term in the PageRank model.