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> We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know. I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there wer

> We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know. I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers. I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.

jimbokun 3y ago
> Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank Well yes. That was one of the Great Inventions in Human History. (Obviously not just page rank but also everything else that made it a working product, but that was the key innovation.)
- n3150n 3y ago
  Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks. I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
  - pzs 3y ago
    "the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walk" - I think the parent's point was the impact not that the algorithm itself is unprecedented. You could argue in the same way that the wheel is just a solid symmetric disk connected to a hub in the center that helps vehicles move around on a sufficiently even surface. Note that I don't imply that PageRank is as significant an invention as the wheel.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    WWW was a simple layer over HTTP, inspired by many other existing hyper text systems. Every great invention is just a simple addition to all the accumulated knowledge in human history up to that point.

jimbokun 3y ago

> Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank Well yes. That was one of the Great Inventions in Human History. (Obviously not just page rank but also everything else that made it a working product, but that was the key innovation.)

n3150n 3y ago
Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks. I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
- pzs 3y ago
  "the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walk" - I think the parent's point was the impact not that the algorithm itself is unprecedented. You could argue in the same way that the wheel is just a solid symmetric disk connected to a hub in the center that helps vehicles move around on a sufficiently even surface. Note that I don't imply that PageRank is as significant an invention as the wheel.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  WWW was a simple layer over HTTP, inspired by many other existing hyper text systems. Every great invention is just a simple addition to all the accumulated knowledge in human history up to that point.