Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today - you need something else. It was one of many possible ranking hacks, and one that worked at the particular time in that particular state of the web where nobody was gaming links because PageRank didn't exist yet. Maybe you could invent a good ranking algorithm for the modern internet, perhaps just the reciprocal of the number of ads on the page, minus its AI detector score, but probably not that.<p>Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.
> Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.<p>I've always taken it as a happy double play since it is named after Page, but also ranks pages.
Really?? And not BrinRank?
> Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with this precise algorithm, i.e., PageRank, which was one of the key algorithms that helped catapult Google into a household name and made them tons of money. Both Sergey and Larry were grad students at Stanford, so their coming up with such an amazing algorithm doesn’t seem surprising.<p>No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank.<p><a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en</a>
PageRank is fascinating, since it is so easy to explain.<p>Yet, this is not even half the work. It like a third of the way.<p>Before you could have invented PageRank, you must think in graphs. That is possible in 1996, but not as widespread as today.<p>After you invented PageRank, you still need to deploy it. Again, possible but challenging as well. Is Python performant enough in 96? Can you afford more than 4MB RAM?<p>At least Lego will not sue you for using their bricks to build a server rack in 1996.
Well, I was a child in 1996, so probably not.<p>Tying relevancy to link frequency was definitely a novel idea at the time, even if it seems "obvious" or simple in retrospect.
Yup. I was there, using the web, back then. I used Altavista dozens of times a day. It wasn't very good.<p>I never thought of it.<p>I never thought of the Million Dollar Homepage, either.<p>It's still there! <a href="https://milliondollarhomepage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://milliondollarhomepage.com/</a><p>I remember the first ever HTML CV (résumé) being published.<p>I am Slashdot user #6030. I used it for ages before I created a user account.<p>I was already paying for my own personal email address in 1991 when timbl revealed the WWW to the world. I thought it was a gimmick. It'd never catch on. We already had Gopher and Archie and Veronica.<p><i>deep sigh</i>
How do you compute page rank for billion of pages that have cyclic links? Is that not the problem right after the initial idea?
That is not at all a problem. Links dampen their effect and you run it until convergence - read the paper. It's no different than summing an infinite convergent series, $\sum_{i=0}^n a^{-n}$.<p>Also, WTF, it seems impossible to find a PDF of the original paper still on the web without a paywall.
If I had received funding from DARPA, and NASA, perhaps I could have.
One is reminded of Damien Hirst's famed retort to a critic who said "Well I could have pickled a shark"
...
"But you didn't, did you. I did."
Reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech, where he talked about the man in the arena:<p>> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.<p><a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbonne-paris-france-citizenship-republic" rel="nofollow">https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbon...</a>
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