The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998) [pdf]

I love how the (now famous) researchers dismiss at the time what has become Google&#x27;s main chase:<p>&quot;These types of personalized PageRanks are virtually immune to manipulation by commercial interests. For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page, or a lot of non-important pages to link to it. At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements(links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money&quot;

And here&#x27;s the original patent. I never knew until now that Sergey Brin wasn&#x27;t on it.<p>Will expire in about a year and three months!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;patents&#x2F;US6285999" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;patents&#x2F;US6285999</a>

the best part of the paper was this: &quot;To test the utility of PageRank for search we built a web search engine called Go ogle&quot; now a company worth hundreds of billions.

Also fun and related: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~sergey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~sergey&#x2F;</a><p>And another paper by Page and Brin: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html</a>

Also relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!msg&#x2F;comp.lang.java&#x2F;aSPAJO05LIU&#x2F;ushhUIQQ-ogJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!msg&#x2F;comp.lang.java&#x2F;aSPAJO0...</a>

Is it still possible in today&#x27;s Academia setting to conceive a company like Google without oweing anything to the institution in which it was created? It looks like the first version of Google was even hosted on Stanford&#x27;s computers.

This is 1998 Link. Is this still at least partially valid

But does it work in practice? It doesn&#x27;t seem to. PageRank is mostly a marketing tool.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;hits-on-the-web-how-does-it-compare&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;publication&#x2F;hits-on...</a><p>&quot;The fact that in-degree features outperform PageRank under all measures is quite surprising. A possible explanation is that link-spammers have been targeting the published PageRank algorithm for many years, and that this has led to anomalies in the web graph that affect PageRank.&quot;

Any act of measuring a system changes that system. Pagerank did more to destroy the value of the web of links than any other technology before it because it was so good at measuring its value. Extracting that value then instantly leads to diminishing it because others (in this case the link spammers) want a slice of that huge pie.<p>I believe that each and every technology that successfully manages to index the web in a new and useful way will further diminish the value of the web.

Are there any other good reads on how this technology is implemented, the shortcomings since it was first released, improvements in the algorithm, splitting the calculations up into a map-reduce for the modern (larger) web, and anything else that might be a good read?<p>I just googled for some implementations like this one in Go: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dcadenas&#x2F;pagerank" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dcadenas&#x2F;pagerank</a>

This reminds me of the new Black Mirror season 3 pilot