... Currently, most of the information that would be needed to calculate DebtRank or any other similar measure is simply not public. That's why this idea won't

... Currently, most of the information that would be needed to calculate DebtRank or any other similar measure is simply not public. That's why this idea won't work - banks simply don't disclose their risk levels. And the article's title is misleading: Google is not building an algorithm to avert financial crises. A team of European physicists and economists created an algorithm (called "DebtRank") based on the PageRank algorithm to identify patterns that could potential lead to a financial crisis. (But, again, the "DebtRank" algorithm needs more data that's not publicly available.)