While all these techniques are related and LSI is a good model for what he is doing, I think his thought process is spiritually closer to PageRank. Although I d

While all these techniques are related and LSI is a good model for what he is doing, I think his thought process is spiritually closer to PageRank. Although I don't think he merely adapted the page rank algorithm. Based on his emphasis on markov chains and his diagrams, I think his algorithm works by building a markov chain from word co-ocurrances. Then when the user searches, it uses the words from the highest incoming edges to keywords to disambiguate word meaning and cluster tweets. I would argue based on his justification by random walks that given enough time and study he would have ended up with LDA and not LSA.