
The research paper that launched the Google empire - chandrab
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
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python_kiss
Interestingly, Larry Page was reluctant to publish this infamous research
paper when it was first conceived. Much of Larry's thinking was inspired by
Nikola Tesla's life; a genius whose inventions were often mocked upon and
stolen by Thomas Edison. It was Larry's research advisor who convinced him to
publish the paper.

Other interesting sites:-

Google Search Engine in 1997: <http://backrub.tjtech.org/1997/index.htm>

Explanation of PageRank: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

BackRub research (which ultimiately led to PageRank):
<http://backrub.tjtech.org/1997/backrub.htm>

lol@"Sorry, many services are unavailable due to a local network faliure
beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up
soon. 12/4/97"

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amichail
For a clever variation on PageRank using vision-based page segmentation, see:

<http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=754>

For a more sophisticated web page similarity measure inspired by PageRank,
see:

<http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~glenj/simrank.pdf>

For a ton of very cool papers on these sorts of topics, check out:

<http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/aux/index-en.html>

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amichail
"Link spam is used to increase the ranking of certain target web pages by
misleading the connectivity-based ranking algorithms in search engines. In
this paper we study how web pages can be interconnected in a spam farm in
order to optimize rankings. We also study alliances, that is, interconnections
of spam farms. Our results identify the optimal structures and quantify the
potential gains. In particular, we show that alliances can be synergistic and
improve the rankings of all participants. We believe that the insights we gain
will be useful in identifying and combating link spam."

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~zoltan/publications/gyongyi2005link.pdf>

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amichail
It's interesting that most web 2.0 services do not appear deep in any
theoretical sense. In particular, 99% probably do not have anything that comes
even close to the sophistication behind the PageRank algorithm.

But still, some web 2.0 services have become very popular.

It seems that if you do not have any sophisticated algorithms behind your
approach, you can still succeed if you are the first to address a need (even
if you do it in the most naive way imaginable) and you get sufficient
publicity.

The vast majority of people could care less about sophisticated algorithms.
The vast majority of people do not obsess over whether an approach is prone to
spam.

