
Scientist discovers PageRank-type algorithm from the 1940s - alexandros
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24821/
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lmkg
Page Rank is not a particularly impressive algorithm. The technical leap that
Google made was the idea of having outgoing links be a proxy for authority,
and it was an innovative and useful observation. Page Rank is about the
second-simplest implementation of that concept (the first-simplest would not
have the dampening factor). It's just a glorified eigenvector problem. Page
Rank is not impressive for being a significant technical breakthrough. In
fact, I think Page Rank is more impressive for _not_ being a technical
breakthrough. Google came up with a single good idea, and even a very very
simple application of that idea had significant practical benefit.

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wheels
Actually, no PageRank wasn't even the first web search algorithm to do that.
HITS, by Jon Kleinberg was the first rigorous formulation of that notion
(which is mentioned in the article) and was cited in the original PageRank
paper. It was widely known at the time that it was a concept imported from
library science for correlation in co-citation patterns.

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zandorg
That happens a lot. Someone invents something at the same time as another guy.
One of these guys has some VC or Angel cash. Guess who succeeds most?

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wheels
Uhm, Jon Kleinberg is an academic (one of computer science's finest) and was
clearly cited in the PageRank paper. He's authored seminal publications across
several sub-fields of computer science, he's in a named chair in an Ivy League
university, and laid the foundations for modern web search. I'd say he's been
pretty successful for a guy in his 30s.

<http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/>

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mnemonicsloth
Kalman didn't invent the Kalman filter. He learned about the discrete
equivalent from Stratonovich and adapted it to the continuous case, and that
was the name that stuck. But every _useful_ Kalman filter is actually a
Stratonovich filter, because they're all digital.

I guess having a short name makes you more likely to become immortal.

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georgecmu
It's not so much the short name as being on the right side of Atlantic.

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kwamenum86
I took a class with Jon Kleinberg called Networks co-taught by an economics
professor. Introduced me to power laws, Nash equili riums, and six degrees of
separation(or rather the validity thereof) Brilliant class. Brilliant guy.

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neilc
Google's search quality very likely doesn't have very much to do with the
PageRank algorithm as such. Certainly PageRank isn't much of a qualitative
improvement over prior work like HITS, and any reasonable web-scale search
engine can easily incorporate some variant on the HITS/PageRank idea.

[http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/09/hits-pagerank-and-
keepin...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/09/hits-pagerank-and-keeping-it-
simple.html)

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jmount
Even better than that the 1965 Hubble paper is pretty relevant to the
"folklore" algorithms for eigenvector based graph partitioning that keep
getting re-discovered (without attribution) again and again.

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dangrossman
PR is simple enough that "Given this link graph, what is the PR of site C" was
a question on a written exam in my introductory AI class (meaning no notes,
calculators, computers).

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elblanco
If I remember, converging that matrix to a steady state by hand took lots of
paper and time.

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vinutheraj
It depends on the size of the graph given I guess !

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wallflower
This reminds me of the minor hub-bub around PhotoSynth/VirtualEarth not being
a new technology (e.g. academic researchers have previously researched it in
the past, way before computers had any hope of executing the complex matrix
transformations.)

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georgecmu
I'd rather have the title say "economist proposes" rather than "scientist
discovers".

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codexon
Does this have any implications on Google's pagerank patent by prior art?

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imd
No, because the article says similar work was already known back to 1965, just
not 1941. It was already known Google didn't invent the concept.

