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inigyou 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.
jjice 58 minutes ago [-]
> Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.
I've always taken it as a happy double play since it is named after Page, but also ranks pages.
fbd_0100 49 minutes ago [-]
His name may have influenced him to make his career from ranking pages
It's not like he was going to be a Congressional staffer nor working at a newspaper. But if he was on-call for a lot of his career that'd be kind of amusing
HPsquared 10 minutes ago [-]
He could have also worked for Motorola.
z500 26 minutes ago [-]
I've always wondered what would happen if you named a kid Nominative Determinism. Some kind of paradox?
arcticfox 13 minutes ago [-]
> name change at 18 probably
That's so cool because it's true, and holds very strongly with the semantic concept
order-matters 20 minutes ago [-]
name change at 18 probably
sheriff 13 minutes ago [-]
He'd probably grow up to be the guy who goes around making people do things that sound like their names.
CPLX 13 minutes ago [-]
He would be promptly murdered by someone named Alexander the Great.
MoltenMan 11 minutes ago [-]
Another Goodhart's Law casualty...
montag 60 minutes ago [-]
Really?? And not BrinRank?
esprehn 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
iwontberude 3 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
nayuki 15 minutes ago [-]
Here are two excellent videos visualizing the PageRank algorithm:
PageRank is fascinating, since it is so easy to explain.
Yet, this is not even half the work. It like a third of the way.
Before you could have invented PageRank, you must think in graphs. That is possible in 1996, but not as widespread as today.
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?
At least Lego will not sue you for using their bricks to build a server rack in 1996.
smcg 1 hours ago [-]
Well, I was a child in 1996, so probably not.
Tying relevancy to link frequency was definitely a novel idea at the time, even if it seems "obvious" or simple in retrospect.
paxys 37 minutes ago [-]
Thinking of an algorithm in the abstract is one thing, implementing it at scale is another.
Yes you could have invented PageRank, but could you also have invented MapReduce, BigFiles/Google File System (GFS), Google Web Server, Bigtable, Protobuf? Then spun up fault-tolerant clusters consisting of cheap commodity PC hardware in an era where AWS wasn't even an idea yet? Then invented the concept of Borg to manage this hardware globally?
blueg3 20 minutes ago [-]
When Google started, Beowulf clusters were all the rage. So it wouldn't be a big conceptual leap at all. But productionizing it is serious work.
cmrdporcupine 10 minutes ago [-]
There were smart people around thinking about distributed systems to hire in 1996 just as there is now. It's a dream job for nerds. Productionizing it is not at all hard if you have money to pay people to do it.
Which you get by being a pair of connected Stanford grads living in the most tech connected place in the world, with Stanford alumni and venture capital connected people all around you.
The CS is part is medium-hard. The productionizing part is a hiring problem.
Getting the capital is a whole other aspect.
I knew lots of smart people in 1996 in the first .com wave. None of us made any money :-) I should have moved to San Francisco in 97 like I was originally planning. Oops.
CalChris 43 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Inventor in the context of a U.S. patent has a very narrow and technical meaning, different from the broader concept of "coming up with something." Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank together as grad students in Stanford's Digital Library Project, led by Hector Garcia-Molina. This is simply undisputable and both are listed as co-authors of the PageRank paper [1].
That Larry Page is listed as the sole inventor on the patent, assigned to Stanford, is done for narrow legal reasons since U.S. patents incentivize underlisting inventors and there's little incentive to list oneself as an inventor. What really matters in the context of a patent is assignment, not really authorship. The list of inventors on a patent, especially nowadays, should not be seen as a historical finding about credit.
I remember the first ever HTML CV (résumé) being published.
I am Slashdot user #6030. I used it for ages before I created a user account.
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.
deep sigh
lindig 1 hours ago [-]
How do you compute page rank for billion of pages that have cyclic links? Is that not the problem right after the initial idea?
jmalicki 57 minutes ago [-]
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, $\sum_{i=0}^n a^{-n}$.
Also, WTF, it seems impossible to find a PDF of the original paper still on the web without a paywall.
hluska 48 minutes ago [-]
You’re underestimating the difficulty - actually downloading, parsing and updating the system with billions of pages was a very hard thing in the 1990s.
jmalicki 33 minutes ago [-]
It's not an algorithmic issue, though, that's a systems issue. GGP was talking about the cyclic link nature which isn't an issue of size, it's an issue of convergence.
icedchai 36 minutes ago [-]
Good thing there weren't billions of pages in the 90's.
jmkd 2 hours ago [-]
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."
jaggederest 1 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech, where he talked about the man in the arena:
> 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.
My favorite related pithy quote is "criticism is a minimum-wage job."
salemh 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
truthbe 48 minutes ago [-]
If I had received funding from DARPA, and NASA, perhaps I could have.
rco8786 44 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure that came after. And funding never made anyone smarter.
truthbe 27 minutes ago [-]
Funding didn’t make them smarter, but it did buy the hardware to scale it. Other guys had the exact same idea at the exact same time like RankDex and IBM's HITS algorithm. Google just got the cash first to actually build the server farms to run it.
CPLX 9 minutes ago [-]
> funding never made anyone smarter
One of my favorite things about HN is the way that you can find someone who has produced definitive proof of the non-existence of the public education system in an offhand comment.
Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.
I've always taken it as a happy double play since it is named after Page, but also ranks pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
That's so cool because it's true, and holds very strongly with the semantic concept
* [2020-06-17] Spanning Tree - "How Google's PageRank Algorithm Works" (5m16s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meonLcN7LD4
* [2022-05-23] Reducible - "PageRank: A Trillion Dollar Algorithm" (25m25s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGQe4kiPnrU
Yet, this is not even half the work. It like a third of the way.
Before you could have invented PageRank, you must think in graphs. That is possible in 1996, but not as widespread as today.
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?
At least Lego will not sue you for using their bricks to build a server rack in 1996.
Tying relevancy to link frequency was definitely a novel idea at the time, even if it seems "obvious" or simple in retrospect.
Yes you could have invented PageRank, but could you also have invented MapReduce, BigFiles/Google File System (GFS), Google Web Server, Bigtable, Protobuf? Then spun up fault-tolerant clusters consisting of cheap commodity PC hardware in an era where AWS wasn't even an idea yet? Then invented the concept of Borg to manage this hardware globally?
Which you get by being a pair of connected Stanford grads living in the most tech connected place in the world, with Stanford alumni and venture capital connected people all around you.
The CS is part is medium-hard. The productionizing part is a hiring problem.
Getting the capital is a whole other aspect.
I knew lots of smart people in 1996 in the first .com wave. None of us made any money :-) I should have moved to San Francisco in 97 like I was originally planning. Oops.
No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en
That Larry Page is listed as the sole inventor on the patent, assigned to Stanford, is done for narrow legal reasons since U.S. patents incentivize underlisting inventors and there's little incentive to list oneself as an inventor. What really matters in the context of a patent is assignment, not really authorship. The list of inventors on a patent, especially nowadays, should not be seen as a historical finding about credit.
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-PageRank-Citation-...
I never thought of it.
I never thought of the Million Dollar Homepage, either.
It's still there! https://milliondollarhomepage.com/
I remember the first ever HTML CV (résumé) being published.
I am Slashdot user #6030. I used it for ages before I created a user account.
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.
deep sigh
Also, WTF, it seems impossible to find a PDF of the original paper still on the web without a paywall.
> 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.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbon...
One of my favorite things about HN is the way that you can find someone who has produced definitive proof of the non-existence of the public education system in an offhand comment.