
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998) [pdf] - niico
http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
======
hbbio
I love how the (now famous) researchers dismiss at the time what has become
Google's main chase:

"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"

~~~
rahrahrah
And yet, everything in that paragraph is absolutely true. If anything, they
have stopped short from taking it to its logical conclusions. Since it costs
money, only when more money than it costs is involved will this take place.

~~~
rahrahrah
To go further, the implicit assumption that they were making when stopping
short was: Google will never be big enough that people will spend money to
manipulate it. But it did, and people do.

To me this reinforces that you should take seriously things like 50% bitcoin
attacks. If bitcoins become valuable enough, someone will do it.

------
jzl
And here's the original patent. I never knew until now that Sergey Brin wasn't
on it.

Will expire in about a year and three months!

[https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999](https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999)

~~~
sparky_z
Well, they didn't call it Brinrank :)

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

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andrewstuart2
Also fun and related:
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

And another paper by Page and Brin:
[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

~~~
andreygrehov
10+ years ago I needed to contact someone from Google and I found this page.
At the time, I didn't know who Sergey Brin is. So I mailed the guy to an email
provided at the bottom of the page and told my colleagues something like:

    
    
        I found a guy who works at Google, we should be all good, I just emailed him, let's see what he says. 
    

Everyone was laughing their heads off when they asked me the guy's name.

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ucaetano
Also relevant:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO05LIU/ushhUIQQ-
ogJ)

~~~
scoot
In the mobile app I'm using the company name in your comment has split across
two lines as "Go-ogle", which suddenly made so much sense!

I was slightly disappointed that this isn't what it says in the paper, or
presumably your comment!

(Still no Ida why it was split when words are usually wrapped.)

------
karakal
Is it still possible in today'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's
computers.

~~~
Keverw
Do colleges own startups people create while going to school? If so that
sounds horrible considering how much college costs.

I heard if you work for a company while also developing a startup depending on
the contract the company can claim they own the startup - even if you were
working on it at home with your computer you bought with your own money and
off the clock for them.

~~~
ucaetano
No, but they do own patents created by their researchers.

Stanford didn't own Google, they owned the PageRank patent, which they
licensed to Google in return for equity.

~~~
Keverw
Interesting. "patents created by their researchers" so if it's a official
school project then, and not someone doing it on their own? That would makes
since. I don't get why schools need patents in the first place though.

~~~
ucaetano
Even if they're doing it on their own, it might be owned by the school if it
is related to the work they're doing, just like any company.

~~~
Keverw
Interesting. I thought people went to college to learn, not to work for the
school.

Do they get paid to do this sort of stuff too? I know I heard of people
working in like the library to help pay down their loans. Just never really
thought of colleges owning IP. So just a bit of a surprise to me.

~~~
ucaetano
Universities are research centers, not just schools.

Undergraduate students get scholarships for doing research, grad students do
research as part of their studies and professors are usually researchers as
well.

~~~
jacquesm
According to this article Universities are hedge funds with schools attached.

[https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-
becoming-...](https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming-
billion-dollar-hedge-funds-with-schools-attached/)

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

~~~
upen
I think Google stopped updating Pagerank two years back

~~~
rbinv
You're thinking of the "public" PageRank value previously displayed in
Google's browser toolbars. Those are indeed no longer updated. However, there
is still some variant of "PageRank" in use internally.

~~~
visarga
They are probably still using it, but I think they apply spam and duplicate
content detection first and also limit PageRank flow to sites of similar
topic. Another thing they could do is to nullify the old links for resold
websites.

Besides that, time spent on page and social signals such as likes and tweets
probably count for more than links. A crappy spam site would be disregarded
pretty soon, because people would immediately bounce back to Google and try
other sites.

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ssn
But does it work in practice? It doesn't seem to. PageRank is mostly a
marketing tool.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hits-
on...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hits-on-the-web-
how-does-it-compare/)

"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."

~~~
srean
Well, if you are looking for a measure that is the easiest to game, abuse and
spam, you cant go wrong with your pagerank killer: in-degree.

It works less well than it used to, but its never used in isolation. Used in
isolation its a pretty good porn detector.

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jacquesm
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.

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.

~~~
codeulike
_Any act of measuring a system changes that system._

How about when I measure a stick using a ruler?

~~~
nothrabannosir
He means a system that can react to the measurements. Like how predicting the
stock market is fundamentally impossible because whatever you do, the stock
market can react to your prediction.

~~~
codeulike
But he said 'Any'. I'm looking for a counterexanple.

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Xeoncross
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?

I just googled for some implementations like this one in Go:
[https://github.com/dcadenas/pagerank](https://github.com/dcadenas/pagerank)

~~~
combatentropy
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sergey+brin](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sergey+brin)

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teddyknox
This reminds me of the new Black Mirror season 3 pilot

