13 ms·

Google's PageRank patent has expired

507 points by dfabulich 7y ago

enriquto 7y ago
Every once and then I remember that you can actually patent algorithms. Terror ensues, and a general feeling of frustration and helplesness. Then I try to forget this fact slowly, just to be able to continue living in this crazy world. As a mathematician, i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign!
- jMyles 7y ago
  > As a mathematician You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the current system of IP is completely contrary to the nature of the universe. It will be over soon.
  - mikro2nd 7y ago
    I'm curious to know what gives you confidence that it will be over soon?
    - mrighele 7y ago
      Partially in jest, once/if Chinese companies start to hold more patents than American companies (as in "value", not numbers) you will see the US attitude versus patents to be different.
      - Krasnol 7y ago
        Thats quite optimistic. I'd say that if they steal from the Chinese, they won't talk about it much (or say it was the other way around) and continue just the way it was in case they come up with something patentable again.
      - taffer 7y ago
        Did the British attitude to patents change when German companies started owning more patents than British companies?
        oblio 7y ago
        Yes, when those patents started pointing guns at British interests :)
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        Not a patent example, but there's a reason "asprin" is a generic term in the US.
        justincormack 7y ago
        Yes. For example the British arranged to cancel all German patents after ww2. This led to eg the development of the Japanese camera industry among many other things.
        taffer 7y ago
        I fail to see the parallels between Germany after World War II and China in 2019. China's patent situation is much closer to Germany in the late 19th century and the British didn't throw away their patent system in the 19th century just because Germany patented more.
      - mikro2nd 7y ago
        You may be correct regarding American response. I'd suggest that alongside that, what we're likely to see is the Chinese government significantly tightening up on IP-rights enforcement because it would then be to their advantage to do so. So a nett result of greater IP-rights enforcement globally rather than the original optimistic/hopeful "it will be over soon" assessment.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    contrary to the nature of the universe? That seems a few levels lower than merely unworkable, I mean a penny falling slower than a bowling ball is contrary to the nature of the universe, I don't think patents contravene anything as primary as gravity.
    - neiman 7y ago
      You can't patent math theorems because they are not considered inventions, but rather discovering a logical laws of the universe. I treat algorithms in a similar manner.
    - mrzool 7y ago
      Hyperbole | /hʌɪˈpəːbəli/ | noun Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. — The Oxford Dictionary
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    The current IP system is pretty decent.... Just all time limits should be adjusted to 1 year. If I invent something, a 1 year headstart in the market should be plenty of reward.
    - hannasanarion 7y ago
      Seems short, especially for low-yield ip like music. 10-20 is probably good
      - londons_explore 7y ago
        If copyright only lasted a year, you can bet the industry would move to much shorter release cycles and still capture most of the value.
        gomox 7y ago
        Actually research would move in the direction of things whose value can be captured within a year. The patent system shapes the IP industry as whole.
      - enriquto 7y ago
        They are talking about patents here. It has nothing to do with copyright which concerns music and which is perfectly alright. It certainly does not help that they use the ambiguous term IP that does not really mean anything.
  - pron 7y ago
    There is nothing in the nature of the universe that's contrary to trade agreements among people, of which patents are one example. You could say that some agreements are unenforceable under current conditions or perhaps undesirable or even silly, but unless people agree to violate the laws of physics, the universe is agnostic to human contracts. As I wrote in another comment, patents do not protect some truth -- actually, their entire purpose was to help spread truths -- just applications (and human ones, not natural ones).
  - daver00 7y ago
    > It will be over soon The universe or the patent system?
- jlawson 7y ago
  I am not super pro-patent, but I don't think it's totally wild to patent an algorithm. Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover and extremely valuable. Together these facts are why the patent system can usefully apply, same as traditional patent classes. And lots of traditional types of patents are "algorithms" too, really. It's not that different from, say, patenting a drug. The algorithm to manufacture [insert expensive drug here] probably isn't that hard to follow, but it was very hard to discover, and we want to encourage more people to discover more algorithms like this. The real issue is that the people in the court system can't understand the different between trivial, straightforward, somewhat advanced, and truly sophisticated algorithms. Also, since you don't need to risk health and life to test them, computer algorithms are typically easier to test than drugs, so it's likely that few-to-none of them satisfy the "difficult to invent" standard that drug molecules do. It costs like a billion dollars to develop a drug; PageRank was made by a few guys in a room in a matter of months. As another interesting point of comparison, a lot of old weird gun designs from the late 19th/early 20th century were made to get around patents. It's dumb to make a "blow-forward" pistol but there was a time when the straightforward "blow-back" system was patented. Whole countries used quite weird and suboptimal weapons for a long time simply to avoid patent entanglements. I'm sure to them it seemed similar - how can you patent putting these 2 pieces of metal together in this shape? These systems were not very complicated.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    I totally cannot bend my mind around this. It is irrelevant if patents on algorithms are useful and good for society in some cases. They are so much self-evidently wrong that the point is moot. The fact that "trivial" algorithms can be patented is a different question that I am not addressing. I am talking only about the non-trivial algorithms that require a stroke of genius. Imagine that Euclid's algorithm was patented? Or Pythagoras theorem? Or the definition of exterior derivative? Or the expression of a function as Fourier series? All of these are valuable ideas that are non-trivial to come by. The same argument for software patents applies to each of these cases, and in all these cases it is evident (to me) that these mathematical constructions cannot be patented, and that society cannot grant monopoly of their usage to their discoverers.
- LudwigNagasena 7y ago
  Every patent and even every technology is basically an algorithm. And they are valuable because they are true (not sure how mathematical truth is different from any other type of truth).
  - rawoke083600 7y ago
    agreed ! Also their is a lot of hard work and engineering in offering the solution as well... Just knowing the algorithm wont help.
- bartimus 7y ago
  Would you, as a mathematician, prefer a world where innovative theorems become covered in secrecy if it means such things couldn't be patented anymore?
  - enriquto 7y ago
    I do not understand what you are talking about. In our world, you cannot patent theorems but people publish them anyway. Why? for the honor of human spirit, or to impress chicks, whatever.
    - taffer 7y ago
      I think what he's referring to is that you have to publish your invention to get it patented. The idea of patents was basically to get a temporary monopoly for publishing the secret sauce so that anyone can use your invention after the protection period is over.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      I wouldn't take it for granted that people publish. Many mathematicians work on wall street, and they would never publish something they came up with if it wasnt 10000% certain the theorem isnt a commercial secret. Money wins all, especially in mathematics half of which was invented to make counting money easier.
      - enriquto 7y ago
        Yes, of course. Not all known theorems are published immediately. What is the problem with that? Hiding a truth you have discovered is OK. "Owning" a truth that you have told everyone is absurd.
        vikramkr 7y ago
        Owning a truth for a limited period of time in return for telling everyone instead of keeping it a secret is not absurd. Society would rather you tell people so people can build on it (at least in noncommercial ways, or via license) while you own it than keep it secret, so we created the patent system. The alternative could easily be trade secrets until you die and never reveal it, and as a society we decided to incentivize you to not do that
- jgtrosh 7y ago
  I have helped patent my work for my company against bonuses and it's a source of personal shame even though most people I tell this seem to think it's very honorable.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I think I get what you're saying. It's like patenting the theory of gravity. You're just describing some intrinsic logical fact about this universe.
- pron 7y ago
  > i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign! I'm not defending the patenting of algorithms [1], but what is protected by algorithm patents is not their mathematical truth -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I'll explain -- just as what is protected by mechanical patents is not some physical truth. You are free to publish a patented algorithm (provided you don't copy your text verbatim from a copyrighted source), teach it, study it, etc. to spread that truth and expand it. What you're not allowed to do without permission from the patent owner is to implement it and run it on a computer; i.e. what is protected is not a truth but a certain human action. This is the same for mechanical inventions, which could be equally said to be "physical truths": a mechanism built in this way would, according to the laws of physics, behave in that particular way etc. Similarly, you are allowed to publish and study that physical truth -- what you're not allowed to do is to build it. Again, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, only pointing out that it is not truth that's protected by patents, but application. In fact, one of the original motivations for patent protection is precisely to encourage people to not keep doscovered truths secret by promising them that profitable applications would be reserved to them for some period of time. So patents were designed to help spread truth in exchange for protecting applications. That this is what patents are intended to do is a fact. It's fine to object to patents -- there are good arguments both in favor and against -- but completely misunderstanding what patents are and what it is that they protect is not one of them. [1]: I'm not in principle against that, either, except that in practice few patented algorithms rise to the level of inventiveness that patents are intended to protect.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    > This is the same for mechanical inventions And just like with software patents, people come up with weird workarounds: > Sun-and-planet motion. The spur-gear to the right, called the planet-gear, is tied to the center of the other, or sun-gear, by an arm which preserves a constant distance between their centers. This was used as a substitute for the crank in a steam engine by James Watt, after the use of the crank had been patented by another party. Each revolution of the planet-gear, which is rigidly attached to the connecting-rod, gives two to the sun-gear, which is keyed to the fly-wheel shaft. http://507movements.com/mm_039.html http://507movements.com/mm_039.html If you look at the animation at the link, you can see it's just a crank with two extra gears attached
- JohnStrangeII 7y ago
  Same here(though not a mathematician). Patenting algorithms is so horribly wrong on every level, it's still beyond my comprehension how this could ever be allowed. Some of the patents are ridiculously absurd and luckily rarely enforced. I remember the guy on sci.crypt who had a patent on "cascading ciphers", which covered almost any cipher build out of smaller cryptographic building blocks. It basically concerned almost any stream cipher mode and any attempt of combining more than one building block with XOR somewhere. Luckily, the guy never had the money to enforce it although he might have earned some royalties from doing nothing. Heck, Siemens used to have a German patent on the Internet, except that it wasn't called Internet but something like "making available of structured textual data representations via long-range data transmission", etc.
- derefr 7y ago
  Ah, but you’re not patenting the theorem! Remember what happens when drug companies re-discover a useful molecule that turns out to have “prior art” as a molecule that people have been consuming in some every-day herb or some-such. They can’t patent that molecule (because they didn’t invent it), and there’s no profit motive to go through FDA compliance for a non-patented drug. But, there’s nothing stopping them from finding the “theorem” behind the “algorithm”—figuring out what it is about the molecule’s structure that makes it have the effect it has—and then discovering another molecule in the same class (another “algorithm” constructively proving the same “theorem”), and then patenting that. Same is true for actual algorithms: if PageRank is patented, I can just look at the theorem behind it—efficient eigenvalue derivation—and then come up with a different constructive proof of it. It’s easy once you know it’s possible. And, because there are so many known isomorphisms between algorithms (e.g. between algorithms on pointer machines vs. RAM word machines) there are often “obvious” transformations of the algorithm that aren’t considered the same algorithm from the patent office’s POV. (And, I mean, technically they aren’t; they might have a very slightly higher time-complexity, by a factor of the inverse Ackermann function or something. But these are things that don’t matter in practice, just like the random extra bits that the drug companies tack onto their molecules don’t matter in practice.)
  - VistaBrokeMyPC 7y ago
    See: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica esketamine patent. [0] The FDA just approved the use of the drug, [1] which is basically a ketamine molecule cut in half (ketamine is a racemic molecule), [2] and J&J is selling it for HUNDREDS of dollars per treatment, while regular Ketalar brand ketamine is damn-near as cheap as saline. [0] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/700509903/fda-clears-esketamine-nasal-spray-for-hard-to-treat-depression https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/7005099... [2] Arketamine (R(-) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Arketamine_structure.svg/400px-Arketamine_structure.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Ar... Esketamine (S(+) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Esketamine2DCSD.svg/300px-Esketamine2DCSD.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Es...
- nickjj 7y ago
  I run into this scenario a lot as a freelance developer. Companies often request that any code you write that's a part of their contract work must not leave that project and they own all IP rights to every line of code you deliver. Which isn't reasonable most of the time because technically if you imported a library from Python's standard library you can't import that library again in another project without violating the contract. Or if you pasted in a snippet of code from a library's documentation, since you did it on their time, you can't use it again on another project. I always do my best to get things reworded to differentiate generic code from business / trade secrets code, and then for the generic code they either license the code from me as MIT or I license the code from them as MIT.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  It makes a bit more sense if, like the patent office, you view it through the lens of "subject matter directly reducible to an electronic circuit design". Algorithms that meet this criterion are, by necessity, patentable in every country that allows patenting of electronic circuit designs. Most theorems in mathematics are not like this. (This is a deep rabbit hole. All mechanical patents have the same theoretical equivalence to computer algorithms, though less obvious. The lines that define patentable subject matter do not have a rigorous basis, it is an arbitrary convention.) This is also why so-called business method patents (i.e. doing X, but on the Internet), which are often improperly conflated with algorithm patents under the rubric of "software patents", are generally not patentable.
rawoke083600 7y ago
Back to keywords in meta and h1 then ? /s
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  That's still table stakes for SEO. Although not sure being in <h1> matters, but doesn't do any harm.
gigatexal 7y ago
Cue all the whiteboard interviewers: “implement the page rank algorithm, please.”
- colmvp 7y ago
  Followed by “what is the time and space complexity?”
rakibtg 7y ago
Because they dont need it anymore.
savrajsingh 7y ago
I bet the purpose of this patent was to check the investor box of “yes we have a patent,” they’ve never had enforce it, and competitors were not really discouraged by it. Thoughts?
- utopcell 7y ago
  Patents can be defensive. Someone else could had patented it and used it against them. Also (subjective opinion), they were kids: They thought patenting it was important, like they thought asking Yahoo for a mere $1M to buy it was a great deal.
ykevinator 7y ago
It's too broad to say all algorithms should not be patentable. Amazon's one click buy and page rank are obvious to "those skilled in the arts" but there are plenty of algorithms that should be patentable. The problem is that the uspto doesn't properly get an expert consensus on obviousness.
bborud 7y ago
Myth: PageRank was the secret to Google's success It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess. To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast. And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits). Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user. (Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)
- baccheion 7y ago
  Google's success was due to marketing and the opportunity to do so at massive scale (wide reach of and frequent media coverage). Even PageRank's mention was marketing, though the world at large had no idea what it meant. Most latched on to Google due to marketing surrounding and due to their IPO. Many heard and understood: money, billions, billionaire, slides and bicycles, etc. After, continued marketing kept it all going. Powerful illusion. Google is the embodiment of candy coated BS. Even now, they mainly continue due to continually marketing themselves as greatness.. ..and paying for Chrome, Android, and first placement on iPhones. They even had internal studies showing that while they are pervasive (most use at least one of their products), there isn't any stickiness. That is, if some other search engine had first placement on iPhones, the majority would be using that one. It's like the site that previously appeared when searching for a definition (dictionary.com?): while many used it and did so frequently, they often didn't even realize where they were. The world (and internet, even) at large is very different from the handful who think themselves aligned with the masses (ie, source of revenue). It's even funnier, as most thinking anyone cared about PageRank don't buy anything. No spending = you don't exist. Anything else is a coincidental nod, stupidity, or coincidence.
sdan 7y ago
So what now? Someone copies PageRank?
- knbknb 7y ago
  Maybe Stanford University no longer gets any license fees from Google for this patent. not sure
- manigandham 7y ago
  Nothing happens. Similar ranking systems are already in use and there's much more to a modern search engine anyway. It's just a small quirk of this very particular approach no longer being fully protected.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- kbumsik 7y ago
  Nothing. Everybody freely has copied PageRank already. It has became one of the basic teaching material in graph theory. For example, NetworkX, a popular graph library in Python, implements PageRank. [1] [1] https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    Years back, graph dbs bragged about implementing PR in a few lines and ecologists using PR on species. https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/current/algorithms/page-rank/ https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/current/algorithms/p... https://phys.org/news/2009-09-web-page-algorithm-critical-species.html https://phys.org/news/2009-09-web-page-algorithm-critical-sp...
  - kreetx 7y ago
    How does that work in the real world - do google simply not care, or it's "fair use" somehow?
umanwizard 7y ago
Pretty amazing that you can patent an idea as simple as multiplying a matrix by itself N times.
- shoo 7y ago
  applied exponentiation
- enitihas 7y ago
  Well it seems much better when you compare it to patenting of rounded corners.
  - baddox 7y ago
    Or how about performing an action on the World Wide Web by clicking a button? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click
    - Fezzik 7y ago
      To be fair, double-clicking was always the default for making a selection in a window... /s
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Well some companies patented one click to order. Hard to beat.
- make3 7y ago
  person, the question actually is which matrix that is
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  Considering there were search engines before Google, the idea apparently wasn’t quite as obvious.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
skunkworker 7y ago
It's a unique milestone to see something so integral to the development of the internet as we now interact with it become expired. It's also telling that we might need to rethink the duration of the patent system as a whole because so much can change within 20 years.
- pishpash 7y ago
  It just makes me feel old, like the internet is last generation's stuff now.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    It is. Aside from looking up information and ordering things, the net is almost completely useless to me now. Nothing is discoverable any more.
    - bredren 7y ago
      The Internet does not feel much like a wild place where you might encounter anything anymore. On the other hand, reality itself is much faster paced because of the Internet. You can go into the world see, try, learn, experience, be hurt, recover and do it all again at a rate never before possible. So real discovery, discovery of what it is to be alive is more accessible than ever.
shoo 7y ago
tangent: if anyone wants to read a good non-fiction book about the history of steam, invention, the patent system, etc -- i can recommend William Rosen's book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention"
tanilama 7y ago
But it is no longer that useful anyway. It is probably of more value to Google as a legend for recruiting purpose other than an important technological asset or advantage.
whymauri 7y ago
There's a lot of discussion I see about PageRank for CS purposes, so I'd like to give a slightly different perspective most people haven't heard about. A colleague of mine at CalTech recently used the PageRank Algorithm to model the evolution of in-vivo neural networks [0, page 8]. The concept is pretty good for modeling extensions of simple Hebbian learning and explaining some of the ensemble dynamics (at least in the hippocampus). If you're interested in further reading, there's more work on attractor states in biological learning and associative memory (some of which is cited in the paper). Brief overview: there's debate on whether brain network dynamics are stable or unstable. In networks related to learning and over the timespan of weeks, this experiment observed that ensemble-level dynamic change during learning but some neurons are remarkably stable in how/when they fire. You can rank stability with methods like PageRank, suggesting that connectivity implies importance (and perhaps stability). [0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559104.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559...
- sitkack 7y ago
  Are you sure it is PageRank specifically? These fof maps were used and investigated as far back as the early 1900s. Search for "the page rank book" for a deeper analysis.
  - whymauri 7y ago
    He used a customized version of the PageRank algorithm that comes with MATLAB. The paper is pretty dense with other interesting observations. I think one of the novel contributions is experimental evidence that centrality is important to learning distinct sequences of behaviors. Consider three behaviors: moving right on a linear track, turning around, and moving left. A reinforcement signal could be sugar water. If you place sugar water at the right end of the track the mouse learns the sequence of moving right, drinking, turning around, and moving left to leave. Now, in the hippocampus different ensembles of time and place neurons are correlated with each distinct activity. The inter-ensemble connectivity has to be learned, as the sequence of actions become correlated not just in behavior but in the brain as well. The neurons that most strongly inhabit inter-ensemble connectivity, tend to be those 'stable' and 'important' anchor neurons. Yes, it has been studied before that some neurons are more important than others. But the critical extension here is to long-term stability and learning on an unprecedented time-scale and quantity of simultaneously recorded neurons. The actual microscope itself, is a significant technological advancement in how it stays robust to long- and short-term motion artifacts and was custom designed and built by the first-author. There's also the experiment done on dynamics after traumatic damage to the neural circuits encoding a learned behavior (this is one of the specialty of the Lois group). But that starts deviating from the observation I wanted to make relating to the thread. The conclusion: "Overall, our findings suggest a model where the patterns of activity of individual neurons gradually change over time while the activity of groups of synchronously active neurons ensures the persistence of representations." Seems fairly innocuous, but I'm almost certain it will be controversial to some parties.
Cyclone_ 7y ago
Would be a difficult patent to enforce against a competitor since it would be difficult to tell if a backend is actually implementing this but I suppose it's in their interest to still file for it.
kumarvvr 7y ago
To my knowledge, PR has long been succeeded by more sophisticated models. At one time, perhaps even now, Google had a team of mathematicians constantly tuning its ranking algorithm. PR itself might be the foundation, but it definitely wouldn't be enough to build another Google scale system.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Links are still the single most important factor for ranking, though. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff going on, and the content/information extraction has advanced massively since the early days, but PR (or a similar concept) seems to still be the biggest part of determining how relevant a page is.
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    Atleast the future is not links. With the move towards reactive js based clients, restful api based services, links hardly have the requisite data for indexing. Even page content is extremely fickle to index. Google must be having a js engine as part of its web indexing process.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      They do, and have been using it for quite some time. Not only will they execute JS, they will also do AJAX requests and index the content that is returned. Since the overwhelming majority of the web is still static, I believe links will be fine for the foreseeable future.
  - bborud 7y ago
    How do you know this?
    - luckylion 7y ago
      It's not a secret, they've never said that it changed. Also, I do a lot of work for SEO/Affiliates. The exact same tech with pretty much the same content ranks top 2 for highly competitive keywords when hosted on a very high PR domain, and top 100-1000 when hosted on a normal, on-topic domain. This is consistent over multiple content areas, and it's why the large media companies have begun to sell/rent folders/subdomains on their site. Instant ranking (until somebody else buys access to a larger media company), no risk, as Google doesn't consider "paid publishing" as against their guidelines.
baxtr 7y ago
Maybe they should revert back to PR to yield better Search results
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  So I am not the only one that get pretty bad search results compared to the ones I used to get. What caused this shift?
- anticensor 7y ago
  The current algorithm includes PageRank as its component.
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  The Google results started going bad for me around when project humming bird came along. We need a distributed open data alternative that can be tweaked for your proferences transparently. And we also need to start paying for the internet. The malvertising model we have now is unsustainable and crippling the network in favour of Facebook and Google.
  - bborud 7y ago
    What's stopping you from doing it?
    - thrwayxyz 7y ago
      The open source community is a toxic tarpit filled with the unemployable who will happily accuse you of rape or worse to get a $50 payout.
  - xhgdvjky 7y ago
    I would pay for a personalized search engine. I think if the results are ad free I'd pay 10-15 per year (not much since Google is decent).
  - kumarvvr 7y ago
    > We need a distributed open data alternative that can be tweaked for your proferences transparently Wonder if some organization like ACLU or the like take up such a project and release a paid version for power users.
Irishsteve 7y ago
For extra context: back then you would manually submit your site to yahoo and dmoz to end up in their results. They saw themselves as directories. Google was all about crawling and building up the biggest dataset going. Both approaches were victim to keyword stuffing (lots of keywords at the bottom of the page and if you were lucky it was in a marquee tag). Pagerank was a pretty decent extra value with a relevance score to promote trust worthy sites. However there were similar techniques like hubs and authorities from kleinberg. On a side note his old research students / postdocs ended up leading key initiatives at FB newsfeed and Pinterest discovery.
- leoc 7y ago
  Not quite: manually assembled search directories like the old Yahoo! were already passé before Google came out. The increasing size of the Web and the arrival of AltaVista had already made automatically-indexed search engines an established thing. The problem was simply that the AltaVista results were overwhelmed with spam. Early on Google search results were very well-ranked, but quite narrow since the engine only crawled and indexed a relatively small proportion of the Web. AltaVista's coverage was much better, iirc, and Google's limited scope was often remarked on in places like Slashdot.
- randomdata 7y ago
  Yahoo's directory and dmoz seem orthogonal to Google. Not even in 1994, long before Google and when aptly-named WebCrawler was all the rage, would one turn to Yahoo (dmoz did not exist at the time) to find what they were looking for if they had something specific to look for. Yahoo served as a place to go when you weren't looking for anything in particular and wanted to simply explore the web. There was a time when Yahoo also tried to get into the indexed search space, but never seemed to be a viable competitor against other players in the market. Once Google established their dominance, all bets were completely off.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Altavista and others beside were already crawling the web. Yahoo and Dmoz were curated but Google definitely wasn't the first crawler. As for the approaches being victim to keyword stuffing: that was because the algorithms used were exclusively 'on page' without assigning a value to links.
puranjay 7y ago
Slightly off topic, but has anyone seen a drop in traffic even with the same rankings? Too many of the keywords I used to rank for now have featured snippets. These snippets basically mean that any result after #2 get little to no traffic It used to be that beyond page 1 was a waste, but I reckon now if you're not #1 or the featured snippet, you don't really stand to gain much in terms of traffic
dang 7y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: bad call. Detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782 and marked off-topic.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Sorry dang, I respect your moderation a lot but I have to disagree here that my comment is a shallow dismissal that can’t teach anyone anything. PageRank really is a very simple idea based on elementary linear algebra, a fact many people might not have known. Thus my comment could inspire a curious person to go read more about how PageRank works instead of fearing that there is a Ph.D worth of prerequisites. Furthermore, it is a relevant comment on the US patent system. By the way, I think PageRank is an incredibly important development in the history of technology, and took a fair bit of ingenuity to think up. I’m not dismissive of it at all. But it is also very simple, which doesn’t contradict any of the above. And I don’t think it should be patentable, just like I don’t think other simple and intuitive applications of matrix multiplication (like the chain rule from calculus, for example) should be patentable either.
  - dang 7y ago
    I'm persuaded. Sorry!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gingabriska 7y ago
Is there any page rank library launched on Github? Can exgooglers make such libraries and raise themsleves to open source fame?
- wodenokoto 7y ago
  There are plenty of implementations and how-to’s Out there already. If I remember correctly it is basically a way to calculate a random walk through a network without having to do the walk.
- visarga 7y ago
  It's been done many times, and it's easy to implement for small graphs. Example: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...
  - bhl 7y ago
    As mentioned, the difficulty with PageRank isn’t the implementation, but scaling it to billions of webpages. Doing so would require either extensive knowledge of systems or approximation methods.
- dvirsky 7y ago
  Apache Spark has had an implementation of it for a few years as part of its batteries included. https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.6.1/api/java/org/apache/spark/graphx/lib/PageRank.html https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.6.1/api/java/org/apache/spar...
jacquesm 7y ago
For better or worse, pagerank destroyed the value of inbound links and by extension it killed the web. Now Google, not links determine how your page is found and while I'm sure links still have some value that is only one of a very large number of inputs. I believe it is impossible to come up with some way of ranking web results that does not in the end lead to a destruction of the metric that one uses to rank with, if the metric initially gives great results. Spammers will figure it out and will drown out the signal with noise.
- utopcell 7y ago
  a bit exaggerated, but sadly there's a core of truth to it.
burtonator 7y ago
Here's the raw truth that no one in the valley will admit. It's about two things: 1. Execution. 2. Luck. ... but it's mostly execution. If you have a BRILLIANT idea but can't execute you're dead. There are tons of companies in the history books as examples. BUT... if you can EXECUTE, you can take a shitty idea, abandon it, pivot, measure, and focus BACK on a good idea. Then when you have a good idea you can keep executing it forward. The rest of luck but this can be worked on as luck is often timing + being prepared.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Yeah, but you could say that about the entire universe. It's all execution and randomness.
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  I wonder where you got the idea that no one will admit this. Execution is the number one priority of founders of early stage companies: finding people who can quickly turn their idea into a working product they can iterate on.
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    I'm suspecting it's the 'luck' part the OP thinks people won't/don't admit (or acknowledge enough, perhaps).
    - ldng 7y ago
      Yes. And even in this thread people are minimizing it.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I strongly disagree that execution matters more than luck. I ask myself would I rather be good or lucky, and I will always choose luck. Because no matter how good you are, if luck isn't on your side you're going to lose. You might be the better programmer, but you still didn't get the job. You might have the better proposal, but you still lost the bid. You might be the better candidate, but you still lost the election. You might have a better product, but your company still failed. You might eat right and exercise, but you still got cancer. I see this regularly play out when founders who found success on their first startups attempt to repeat it, only to fail miserably. Granted, there are a handful who manage to duplicate their success, but I know that some of these are simply due to who you know from their first success (you could argue that's better execution, but the number of unicorns I know that wouldn't exist if it weren't for a lucky break from an investor previously befriended makes me think otherwise). I do not mean to belittle the hard work and brilliance of many successful founders, only to emphasize that luck was absolutely critical in nearly every success story. Obviously it's better to have both, but pretending that you can outmaneuver the universe is an act of hubris. I think people pontificating that execution matters more than luck are too arrogant to realize how lucky they are, or want to believe it matters more because it's reassuring to believe that we are in control of our destinies. There are things you can do to increase your exposure to luck, but it's ultimately something beyond your control. The world isn't meritocratic.
sinzone 7y ago
White page that would lod fast when everyone had 56kb was key
samcodes 7y ago
They should have put some round ears on it...
vietvu 7y ago
Page Rank, Map Reduce... those infamous tools that once game changing. But now, I think there are many better ones, just less well known

507 points by dfabulich 7y ago

Every once and then I remember that you can actually patent algorithms. Terror ensues, and a general feeling of frustration and helplesness. Then I try to forget this fact slowly, just to be able to continue living in this crazy world. As a mathematician, i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign!

jMyles 7y ago
> As a mathematician You don't need to be a mathematician to see that the current system of IP is completely contrary to the nature of the universe. It will be over soon.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  I'm curious to know what gives you confidence that it will be over soon?
  - mrighele 7y ago
    Partially in jest, once/if Chinese companies start to hold more patents than American companies (as in "value", not numbers) you will see the US attitude versus patents to be different.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      Thats quite optimistic. I'd say that if they steal from the Chinese, they won't talk about it much (or say it was the other way around) and continue just the way it was in case they come up with something patentable again.
    - taffer 7y ago
      Did the British attitude to patents change when German companies started owning more patents than British companies?
      - oblio 7y ago
        Yes, when those patents started pointing guns at British interests :)
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Not a patent example, but there's a reason "asprin" is a generic term in the US.
      - justincormack 7y ago
        Yes. For example the British arranged to cancel all German patents after ww2. This led to eg the development of the Japanese camera industry among many other things.
        taffer 7y ago
        I fail to see the parallels between Germany after World War II and China in 2019. China's patent situation is much closer to Germany in the late 19th century and the British didn't throw away their patent system in the 19th century just because Germany patented more.
    - mikro2nd 7y ago
      You may be correct regarding American response. I'd suggest that alongside that, what we're likely to see is the Chinese government significantly tightening up on IP-rights enforcement because it would then be to their advantage to do so. So a nett result of greater IP-rights enforcement globally rather than the original optimistic/hopeful "it will be over soon" assessment.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  contrary to the nature of the universe? That seems a few levels lower than merely unworkable, I mean a penny falling slower than a bowling ball is contrary to the nature of the universe, I don't think patents contravene anything as primary as gravity.
  - neiman 7y ago
    You can't patent math theorems because they are not considered inventions, but rather discovering a logical laws of the universe. I treat algorithms in a similar manner.
  - mrzool 7y ago
    Hyperbole | /hʌɪˈpəːbəli/ | noun Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally. — The Oxford Dictionary
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The current IP system is pretty decent.... Just all time limits should be adjusted to 1 year. If I invent something, a 1 year headstart in the market should be plenty of reward.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Seems short, especially for low-yield ip like music. 10-20 is probably good
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      If copyright only lasted a year, you can bet the industry would move to much shorter release cycles and still capture most of the value.
      - gomox 7y ago
        Actually research would move in the direction of things whose value can be captured within a year. The patent system shapes the IP industry as whole.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      They are talking about patents here. It has nothing to do with copyright which concerns music and which is perfectly alright. It certainly does not help that they use the ambiguous term IP that does not really mean anything.
- pron 7y ago
  There is nothing in the nature of the universe that's contrary to trade agreements among people, of which patents are one example. You could say that some agreements are unenforceable under current conditions or perhaps undesirable or even silly, but unless people agree to violate the laws of physics, the universe is agnostic to human contracts. As I wrote in another comment, patents do not protect some truth -- actually, their entire purpose was to help spread truths -- just applications (and human ones, not natural ones).
- daver00 7y ago
  > It will be over soon The universe or the patent system?
jlawson 7y ago
I am not super pro-patent, but I don't think it's totally wild to patent an algorithm. Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover and extremely valuable. Together these facts are why the patent system can usefully apply, same as traditional patent classes. And lots of traditional types of patents are "algorithms" too, really. It's not that different from, say, patenting a drug. The algorithm to manufacture [insert expensive drug here] probably isn't that hard to follow, but it was very hard to discover, and we want to encourage more people to discover more algorithms like this. The real issue is that the people in the court system can't understand the different between trivial, straightforward, somewhat advanced, and truly sophisticated algorithms. Also, since you don't need to risk health and life to test them, computer algorithms are typically easier to test than drugs, so it's likely that few-to-none of them satisfy the "difficult to invent" standard that drug molecules do. It costs like a billion dollars to develop a drug; PageRank was made by a few guys in a room in a matter of months. As another interesting point of comparison, a lot of old weird gun designs from the late 19th/early 20th century were made to get around patents. It's dumb to make a "blow-forward" pistol but there was a time when the straightforward "blow-back" system was patented. Whole countries used quite weird and suboptimal weapons for a long time simply to avoid patent entanglements. I'm sure to them it seemed similar - how can you patent putting these 2 pieces of metal together in this shape? These systems were not very complicated.
- enriquto 7y ago
  I totally cannot bend my mind around this. It is irrelevant if patents on algorithms are useful and good for society in some cases. They are so much self-evidently wrong that the point is moot. The fact that "trivial" algorithms can be patented is a different question that I am not addressing. I am talking only about the non-trivial algorithms that require a stroke of genius. Imagine that Euclid's algorithm was patented? Or Pythagoras theorem? Or the definition of exterior derivative? Or the expression of a function as Fourier series? All of these are valuable ideas that are non-trivial to come by. The same argument for software patents applies to each of these cases, and in all these cases it is evident (to me) that these mathematical constructions cannot be patented, and that society cannot grant monopoly of their usage to their discoverers.
LudwigNagasena 7y ago
Every patent and even every technology is basically an algorithm. And they are valuable because they are true (not sure how mathematical truth is different from any other type of truth).
- rawoke083600 7y ago
  agreed ! Also their is a lot of hard work and engineering in offering the solution as well... Just knowing the algorithm wont help.
bartimus 7y ago
Would you, as a mathematician, prefer a world where innovative theorems become covered in secrecy if it means such things couldn't be patented anymore?
- enriquto 7y ago
  I do not understand what you are talking about. In our world, you cannot patent theorems but people publish them anyway. Why? for the honor of human spirit, or to impress chicks, whatever.
  - taffer 7y ago
    I think what he's referring to is that you have to publish your invention to get it patented. The idea of patents was basically to get a temporary monopoly for publishing the secret sauce so that anyone can use your invention after the protection period is over.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    I wouldn't take it for granted that people publish. Many mathematicians work on wall street, and they would never publish something they came up with if it wasnt 10000% certain the theorem isnt a commercial secret. Money wins all, especially in mathematics half of which was invented to make counting money easier.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      Yes, of course. Not all known theorems are published immediately. What is the problem with that? Hiding a truth you have discovered is OK. "Owning" a truth that you have told everyone is absurd.
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        Owning a truth for a limited period of time in return for telling everyone instead of keeping it a secret is not absurd. Society would rather you tell people so people can build on it (at least in noncommercial ways, or via license) while you own it than keep it secret, so we created the patent system. The alternative could easily be trade secrets until you die and never reveal it, and as a society we decided to incentivize you to not do that
jgtrosh 7y ago
I have helped patent my work for my company against bonuses and it's a source of personal shame even though most people I tell this seem to think it's very honorable.
Waterluvian 7y ago
I think I get what you're saying. It's like patenting the theory of gravity. You're just describing some intrinsic logical fact about this universe.
pron 7y ago
> i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign! I'm not defending the patenting of algorithms [1], but what is protected by algorithm patents is not their mathematical truth -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I'll explain -- just as what is protected by mechanical patents is not some physical truth. You are free to publish a patented algorithm (provided you don't copy your text verbatim from a copyrighted source), teach it, study it, etc. to spread that truth and expand it. What you're not allowed to do without permission from the patent owner is to implement it and run it on a computer; i.e. what is protected is not a truth but a certain human action. This is the same for mechanical inventions, which could be equally said to be "physical truths": a mechanism built in this way would, according to the laws of physics, behave in that particular way etc. Similarly, you are allowed to publish and study that physical truth -- what you're not allowed to do is to build it. Again, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, only pointing out that it is not truth that's protected by patents, but application. In fact, one of the original motivations for patent protection is precisely to encourage people to not keep doscovered truths secret by promising them that profitable applications would be reserved to them for some period of time. So patents were designed to help spread truth in exchange for protecting applications. That this is what patents are intended to do is a fact. It's fine to object to patents -- there are good arguments both in favor and against -- but completely misunderstanding what patents are and what it is that they protect is not one of them. [1]: I'm not in principle against that, either, except that in practice few patented algorithms rise to the level of inventiveness that patents are intended to protect.
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  > This is the same for mechanical inventions And just like with software patents, people come up with weird workarounds: > Sun-and-planet motion. The spur-gear to the right, called the planet-gear, is tied to the center of the other, or sun-gear, by an arm which preserves a constant distance between their centers. This was used as a substitute for the crank in a steam engine by James Watt, after the use of the crank had been patented by another party. Each revolution of the planet-gear, which is rigidly attached to the connecting-rod, gives two to the sun-gear, which is keyed to the fly-wheel shaft. http://507movements.com/mm_039.html http://507movements.com/mm_039.html If you look at the animation at the link, you can see it's just a crank with two extra gears attached
JohnStrangeII 7y ago
Same here(though not a mathematician). Patenting algorithms is so horribly wrong on every level, it's still beyond my comprehension how this could ever be allowed. Some of the patents are ridiculously absurd and luckily rarely enforced. I remember the guy on sci.crypt who had a patent on "cascading ciphers", which covered almost any cipher build out of smaller cryptographic building blocks. It basically concerned almost any stream cipher mode and any attempt of combining more than one building block with XOR somewhere. Luckily, the guy never had the money to enforce it although he might have earned some royalties from doing nothing. Heck, Siemens used to have a German patent on the Internet, except that it wasn't called Internet but something like "making available of structured textual data representations via long-range data transmission", etc.
derefr 7y ago
Ah, but you’re not patenting the theorem! Remember what happens when drug companies re-discover a useful molecule that turns out to have “prior art” as a molecule that people have been consuming in some every-day herb or some-such. They can’t patent that molecule (because they didn’t invent it), and there’s no profit motive to go through FDA compliance for a non-patented drug. But, there’s nothing stopping them from finding the “theorem” behind the “algorithm”—figuring out what it is about the molecule’s structure that makes it have the effect it has—and then discovering another molecule in the same class (another “algorithm” constructively proving the same “theorem”), and then patenting that. Same is true for actual algorithms: if PageRank is patented, I can just look at the theorem behind it—efficient eigenvalue derivation—and then come up with a different constructive proof of it. It’s easy once you know it’s possible. And, because there are so many known isomorphisms between algorithms (e.g. between algorithms on pointer machines vs. RAM word machines) there are often “obvious” transformations of the algorithm that aren’t considered the same algorithm from the patent office’s POV. (And, I mean, technically they aren’t; they might have a very slightly higher time-complexity, by a factor of the inverse Ackermann function or something. But these are things that don’t matter in practice, just like the random extra bits that the drug companies tack onto their molecules don’t matter in practice.)
- VistaBrokeMyPC 7y ago
  See: Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica esketamine patent. [0] The FDA just approved the use of the drug, [1] which is basically a ketamine molecule cut in half (ketamine is a racemic molecule), [2] and J&J is selling it for HUNDREDS of dollars per treatment, while regular Ketalar brand ketamine is damn-near as cheap as saline. [0] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20140093592 [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/700509903/fda-clears-esketamine-nasal-spray-for-hard-to-treat-depression https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/05/7005099... [2] Arketamine (R(-) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Arketamine_structure.svg/400px-Arketamine_structure.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Ar... Esketamine (S(+) - isomer) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Esketamine2DCSD.svg/300px-Esketamine2DCSD.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Es...
nickjj 7y ago
I run into this scenario a lot as a freelance developer. Companies often request that any code you write that's a part of their contract work must not leave that project and they own all IP rights to every line of code you deliver. Which isn't reasonable most of the time because technically if you imported a library from Python's standard library you can't import that library again in another project without violating the contract. Or if you pasted in a snippet of code from a library's documentation, since you did it on their time, you can't use it again on another project. I always do my best to get things reworded to differentiate generic code from business / trade secrets code, and then for the generic code they either license the code from me as MIT or I license the code from them as MIT.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
It makes a bit more sense if, like the patent office, you view it through the lens of "subject matter directly reducible to an electronic circuit design". Algorithms that meet this criterion are, by necessity, patentable in every country that allows patenting of electronic circuit designs. Most theorems in mathematics are not like this. (This is a deep rabbit hole. All mechanical patents have the same theoretical equivalence to computer algorithms, though less obvious. The lines that define patentable subject matter do not have a rigorous basis, it is an arbitrary convention.) This is also why so-called business method patents (i.e. doing X, but on the Internet), which are often improperly conflated with algorithm patents under the rubric of "software patents", are generally not patentable.

rawoke083600 7y ago

Back to keywords in meta and h1 then ? /s

quickthrower2 7y ago
That's still table stakes for SEO. Although not sure being in <h1> matters, but doesn't do any harm.

gigatexal 7y ago

Cue all the whiteboard interviewers: “implement the page rank algorithm, please.”

colmvp 7y ago
Followed by “what is the time and space complexity?”

rakibtg 7y ago

Because they dont need it anymore.

savrajsingh 7y ago

I bet the purpose of this patent was to check the investor box of “yes we have a patent,” they’ve never had enforce it, and competitors were not really discouraged by it. Thoughts?

utopcell 7y ago
Patents can be defensive. Someone else could had patented it and used it against them. Also (subjective opinion), they were kids: They thought patenting it was important, like they thought asking Yahoo for a mere $1M to buy it was a great deal.

ykevinator 7y ago

It's too broad to say all algorithms should not be patentable. Amazon's one click buy and page rank are obvious to "those skilled in the arts" but there are plenty of algorithms that should be patentable. The problem is that the uspto doesn't properly get an expert consensus on obviousness.

bborud 7y ago

Myth: PageRank was the secret to Google's success It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess. To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast. And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits). Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user. (Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)

baccheion 7y ago
Google's success was due to marketing and the opportunity to do so at massive scale (wide reach of and frequent media coverage). Even PageRank's mention was marketing, though the world at large had no idea what it meant. Most latched on to Google due to marketing surrounding and due to their IPO. Many heard and understood: money, billions, billionaire, slides and bicycles, etc. After, continued marketing kept it all going. Powerful illusion. Google is the embodiment of candy coated BS. Even now, they mainly continue due to continually marketing themselves as greatness.. ..and paying for Chrome, Android, and first placement on iPhones. They even had internal studies showing that while they are pervasive (most use at least one of their products), there isn't any stickiness. That is, if some other search engine had first placement on iPhones, the majority would be using that one. It's like the site that previously appeared when searching for a definition (dictionary.com?): while many used it and did so frequently, they often didn't even realize where they were. The world (and internet, even) at large is very different from the handful who think themselves aligned with the masses (ie, source of revenue). It's even funnier, as most thinking anyone cared about PageRank don't buy anything. No spending = you don't exist. Anything else is a coincidental nod, stupidity, or coincidence.

sdan 7y ago

So what now? Someone copies PageRank?

knbknb 7y ago
Maybe Stanford University no longer gets any license fees from Google for this patent. not sure
manigandham 7y ago
Nothing happens. Similar ranking systems are already in use and there's much more to a modern search engine anyway. It's just a small quirk of this very particular approach no longer being fully protected.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kbumsik 7y ago
Nothing. Everybody freely has copied PageRank already. It has became one of the basic teaching material in graph theory. For example, NetworkX, a popular graph library in Python, implements PageRank. [1] [1] https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  Years back, graph dbs bragged about implementing PR in a few lines and ecologists using PR on species. https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/current/algorithms/page-rank/ https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/current/algorithms/p... https://phys.org/news/2009-09-web-page-algorithm-critical-species.html https://phys.org/news/2009-09-web-page-algorithm-critical-sp...
- kreetx 7y ago
  How does that work in the real world - do google simply not care, or it's "fair use" somehow?

umanwizard 7y ago

Pretty amazing that you can patent an idea as simple as multiplying a matrix by itself N times.

shoo 7y ago
applied exponentiation
enitihas 7y ago
Well it seems much better when you compare it to patenting of rounded corners.
- baddox 7y ago
  Or how about performing an action on the World Wide Web by clicking a button? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click
  - Fezzik 7y ago
    To be fair, double-clicking was always the default for making a selection in a window... /s
ekianjo 7y ago
Well some companies patented one click to order. Hard to beat.
make3 7y ago
person, the question actually is which matrix that is
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Considering there were search engines before Google, the idea apparently wasn’t quite as obvious.
- umanwizard 7y ago

skunkworker 7y ago

It's a unique milestone to see something so integral to the development of the internet as we now interact with it become expired. It's also telling that we might need to rethink the duration of the patent system as a whole because so much can change within 20 years.

pishpash 7y ago
It just makes me feel old, like the internet is last generation's stuff now.
- phkahler 7y ago
  It is. Aside from looking up information and ordering things, the net is almost completely useless to me now. Nothing is discoverable any more.
  - bredren 7y ago
    The Internet does not feel much like a wild place where you might encounter anything anymore. On the other hand, reality itself is much faster paced because of the Internet. You can go into the world see, try, learn, experience, be hurt, recover and do it all again at a rate never before possible. So real discovery, discovery of what it is to be alive is more accessible than ever.

shoo 7y ago

tangent: if anyone wants to read a good non-fiction book about the history of steam, invention, the patent system, etc -- i can recommend William Rosen's book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention"

tanilama 7y ago

But it is no longer that useful anyway. It is probably of more value to Google as a legend for recruiting purpose other than an important technological asset or advantage.

whymauri 7y ago

There's a lot of discussion I see about PageRank for CS purposes, so I'd like to give a slightly different perspective most people haven't heard about. A colleague of mine at CalTech recently used the PageRank Algorithm to model the evolution of in-vivo neural networks [0, page 8]. The concept is pretty good for modeling extensions of simple Hebbian learning and explaining some of the ensemble dynamics (at least in the hippocampus). If you're interested in further reading, there's more work on attractor states in biological learning and associative memory (some of which is cited in the paper). Brief overview: there's debate on whether brain network dynamics are stable or unstable. In networks related to learning and over the timespan of weeks, this experiment observed that ensemble-level dynamic change during learning but some neurons are remarkably stable in how/when they fire. You can rank stability with methods like PageRank, suggesting that connectivity implies importance (and perhaps stability). [0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559104.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559...

sitkack 7y ago
Are you sure it is PageRank specifically? These fof maps were used and investigated as far back as the early 1900s. Search for "the page rank book" for a deeper analysis.
- whymauri 7y ago
  He used a customized version of the PageRank algorithm that comes with MATLAB. The paper is pretty dense with other interesting observations. I think one of the novel contributions is experimental evidence that centrality is important to learning distinct sequences of behaviors. Consider three behaviors: moving right on a linear track, turning around, and moving left. A reinforcement signal could be sugar water. If you place sugar water at the right end of the track the mouse learns the sequence of moving right, drinking, turning around, and moving left to leave. Now, in the hippocampus different ensembles of time and place neurons are correlated with each distinct activity. The inter-ensemble connectivity has to be learned, as the sequence of actions become correlated not just in behavior but in the brain as well. The neurons that most strongly inhabit inter-ensemble connectivity, tend to be those 'stable' and 'important' anchor neurons. Yes, it has been studied before that some neurons are more important than others. But the critical extension here is to long-term stability and learning on an unprecedented time-scale and quantity of simultaneously recorded neurons. The actual microscope itself, is a significant technological advancement in how it stays robust to long- and short-term motion artifacts and was custom designed and built by the first-author. There's also the experiment done on dynamics after traumatic damage to the neural circuits encoding a learned behavior (this is one of the specialty of the Lois group). But that starts deviating from the observation I wanted to make relating to the thread. The conclusion: "Overall, our findings suggest a model where the patterns of activity of individual neurons gradually change over time while the activity of groups of synchronously active neurons ensures the persistence of representations." Seems fairly innocuous, but I'm almost certain it will be controversial to some parties.

Cyclone_ 7y ago

Would be a difficult patent to enforce against a competitor since it would be difficult to tell if a backend is actually implementing this but I suppose it's in their interest to still file for it.

kumarvvr 7y ago

To my knowledge, PR has long been succeeded by more sophisticated models. At one time, perhaps even now, Google had a team of mathematicians constantly tuning its ranking algorithm. PR itself might be the foundation, but it definitely wouldn't be enough to build another Google scale system.

luckylion 7y ago
Links are still the single most important factor for ranking, though. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff going on, and the content/information extraction has advanced massively since the early days, but PR (or a similar concept) seems to still be the biggest part of determining how relevant a page is.
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  Atleast the future is not links. With the move towards reactive js based clients, restful api based services, links hardly have the requisite data for indexing. Even page content is extremely fickle to index. Google must be having a js engine as part of its web indexing process.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    They do, and have been using it for quite some time. Not only will they execute JS, they will also do AJAX requests and index the content that is returned. Since the overwhelming majority of the web is still static, I believe links will be fine for the foreseeable future.
- bborud 7y ago
  How do you know this?
  - luckylion 7y ago
    It's not a secret, they've never said that it changed. Also, I do a lot of work for SEO/Affiliates. The exact same tech with pretty much the same content ranks top 2 for highly competitive keywords when hosted on a very high PR domain, and top 100-1000 when hosted on a normal, on-topic domain. This is consistent over multiple content areas, and it's why the large media companies have begun to sell/rent folders/subdomains on their site. Instant ranking (until somebody else buys access to a larger media company), no risk, as Google doesn't consider "paid publishing" as against their guidelines.

baxtr 7y ago

Maybe they should revert back to PR to yield better Search results

ChrisCinelli 7y ago
So I am not the only one that get pretty bad search results compared to the ones I used to get. What caused this shift?
anticensor 7y ago
The current algorithm includes PageRank as its component.
thrwayxyz 7y ago
The Google results started going bad for me around when project humming bird came along. We need a distributed open data alternative that can be tweaked for your proferences transparently. And we also need to start paying for the internet. The malvertising model we have now is unsustainable and crippling the network in favour of Facebook and Google.
- bborud 7y ago
  What's stopping you from doing it?
  - thrwayxyz 7y ago
    The open source community is a toxic tarpit filled with the unemployable who will happily accuse you of rape or worse to get a $50 payout.
- xhgdvjky 7y ago
  I would pay for a personalized search engine. I think if the results are ad free I'd pay 10-15 per year (not much since Google is decent).
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  > We need a distributed open data alternative that can be tweaked for your proferences transparently Wonder if some organization like ACLU or the like take up such a project and release a paid version for power users.

Irishsteve 7y ago

For extra context: back then you would manually submit your site to yahoo and dmoz to end up in their results. They saw themselves as directories. Google was all about crawling and building up the biggest dataset going. Both approaches were victim to keyword stuffing (lots of keywords at the bottom of the page and if you were lucky it was in a marquee tag). Pagerank was a pretty decent extra value with a relevance score to promote trust worthy sites. However there were similar techniques like hubs and authorities from kleinberg. On a side note his old research students / postdocs ended up leading key initiatives at FB newsfeed and Pinterest discovery.

leoc 7y ago
Not quite: manually assembled search directories like the old Yahoo! were already passé before Google came out. The increasing size of the Web and the arrival of AltaVista had already made automatically-indexed search engines an established thing. The problem was simply that the AltaVista results were overwhelmed with spam. Early on Google search results were very well-ranked, but quite narrow since the engine only crawled and indexed a relatively small proportion of the Web. AltaVista's coverage was much better, iirc, and Google's limited scope was often remarked on in places like Slashdot.
randomdata 7y ago
Yahoo's directory and dmoz seem orthogonal to Google. Not even in 1994, long before Google and when aptly-named WebCrawler was all the rage, would one turn to Yahoo (dmoz did not exist at the time) to find what they were looking for if they had something specific to look for. Yahoo served as a place to go when you weren't looking for anything in particular and wanted to simply explore the web. There was a time when Yahoo also tried to get into the indexed search space, but never seemed to be a viable competitor against other players in the market. Once Google established their dominance, all bets were completely off.
jacquesm 7y ago
Altavista and others beside were already crawling the web. Yahoo and Dmoz were curated but Google definitely wasn't the first crawler. As for the approaches being victim to keyword stuffing: that was because the algorithms used were exclusively 'on page' without assigning a value to links.

puranjay 7y ago

Slightly off topic, but has anyone seen a drop in traffic even with the same rankings? Too many of the keywords I used to rank for now have featured snippets. These snippets basically mean that any result after #2 get little to no traffic It used to be that beyond page 1 was a waste, but I reckon now if you're not #1 or the featured snippet, you don't really stand to gain much in terms of traffic

dang 7y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: bad call. Detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782 and marked off-topic.

umanwizard 7y ago
Sorry dang, I respect your moderation a lot but I have to disagree here that my comment is a shallow dismissal that can’t teach anyone anything. PageRank really is a very simple idea based on elementary linear algebra, a fact many people might not have known. Thus my comment could inspire a curious person to go read more about how PageRank works instead of fearing that there is a Ph.D worth of prerequisites. Furthermore, it is a relevant comment on the US patent system. By the way, I think PageRank is an incredibly important development in the history of technology, and took a fair bit of ingenuity to think up. I’m not dismissive of it at all. But it is also very simple, which doesn’t contradict any of the above. And I don’t think it should be patentable, just like I don’t think other simple and intuitive applications of matrix multiplication (like the chain rule from calculus, for example) should be patentable either.
- dang 7y ago
  I'm persuaded. Sorry!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gingabriska 7y ago

Is there any page rank library launched on Github? Can exgooglers make such libraries and raise themsleves to open source fame?

wodenokoto 7y ago
There are plenty of implementations and how-to’s Out there already. If I remember correctly it is basically a way to calculate a random walk through a network without having to do the walk.
visarga 7y ago
It's been done many times, and it's easy to implement for small graphs. Example: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...
- bhl 7y ago
  As mentioned, the difficulty with PageRank isn’t the implementation, but scaling it to billions of webpages. Doing so would require either extensive knowledge of systems or approximation methods.
dvirsky 7y ago
Apache Spark has had an implementation of it for a few years as part of its batteries included. https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.6.1/api/java/org/apache/spark/graphx/lib/PageRank.html https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.6.1/api/java/org/apache/spar...

jacquesm 7y ago

For better or worse, pagerank destroyed the value of inbound links and by extension it killed the web. Now Google, not links determine how your page is found and while I'm sure links still have some value that is only one of a very large number of inputs. I believe it is impossible to come up with some way of ranking web results that does not in the end lead to a destruction of the metric that one uses to rank with, if the metric initially gives great results. Spammers will figure it out and will drown out the signal with noise.

utopcell 7y ago
a bit exaggerated, but sadly there's a core of truth to it.

burtonator 7y ago

Here's the raw truth that no one in the valley will admit. It's about two things: 1. Execution. 2. Luck. ... but it's mostly execution. If you have a BRILLIANT idea but can't execute you're dead. There are tons of companies in the history books as examples. BUT... if you can EXECUTE, you can take a shitty idea, abandon it, pivot, measure, and focus BACK on a good idea. Then when you have a good idea you can keep executing it forward. The rest of luck but this can be worked on as luck is often timing + being prepared.

peterwwillis 7y ago
Yeah, but you could say that about the entire universe. It's all execution and randomness.
rockinghigh 7y ago
I wonder where you got the idea that no one will admit this. Execution is the number one priority of founders of early stage companies: finding people who can quickly turn their idea into a working product they can iterate on.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  I'm suspecting it's the 'luck' part the OP thinks people won't/don't admit (or acknowledge enough, perhaps).
  - ldng 7y ago
    Yes. And even in this thread people are minimizing it.
MegaButts 7y ago
I strongly disagree that execution matters more than luck. I ask myself would I rather be good or lucky, and I will always choose luck. Because no matter how good you are, if luck isn't on your side you're going to lose. You might be the better programmer, but you still didn't get the job. You might have the better proposal, but you still lost the bid. You might be the better candidate, but you still lost the election. You might have a better product, but your company still failed. You might eat right and exercise, but you still got cancer. I see this regularly play out when founders who found success on their first startups attempt to repeat it, only to fail miserably. Granted, there are a handful who manage to duplicate their success, but I know that some of these are simply due to who you know from their first success (you could argue that's better execution, but the number of unicorns I know that wouldn't exist if it weren't for a lucky break from an investor previously befriended makes me think otherwise). I do not mean to belittle the hard work and brilliance of many successful founders, only to emphasize that luck was absolutely critical in nearly every success story. Obviously it's better to have both, but pretending that you can outmaneuver the universe is an act of hubris. I think people pontificating that execution matters more than luck are too arrogant to realize how lucky they are, or want to believe it matters more because it's reassuring to believe that we are in control of our destinies. There are things you can do to increase your exposure to luck, but it's ultimately something beyond your control. The world isn't meritocratic.

sinzone 7y ago

White page that would lod fast when everyone had 56kb was key

samcodes 7y ago

They should have put some round ears on it...

vietvu 7y ago

Page Rank, Map Reduce... those infamous tools that once game changing. But now, I think there are many better ones, just less well known