PageRank explained

jmkd

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."

smcg

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.

inigyou

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.

ianbooker

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.

lproven

Yup. I was there, using the web, back then. I used Altavista dozens of times a day. It wasn't very good. 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

lindig

How do you compute page rank for billion of pages that have cyclic links? Is that not the problem right after the initial idea?

truthbe

If I had received funding from DARPA, and NASA, perhaps I could have.

CalChris

> 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. No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en

paxys

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?

ctbeiser

I could not have invented it. I was one year old.

nayuki

Here are two excellent videos that explain and visualize the PageRank algorithm: * [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

saltysalt

Let's not forget that PageRank unintentionally spawned the SEO industry.

notaigenerated

You could also have invented a wheel because it's so obvious.

seebeegeebee

Step 1: be sponsored by the CIA

joe_the_user

it’ll give you an article on “Hotels for Chickens” if you search “Hotels” because the word matches What if I fricken want fricken "Hotels for Chickens", what about that, huh? I mean, page rank was useful but it was also a step in the direction of "search give you what it think you, not what you asked for" and I think now we can how far and dubious progress in that direction has been.

yungookim

curious, how do you decide on which page to start from? Popular directories?

snarfy

Yes anybody can be in the right place at the right time.

jefflinwood

I actually built this, and shipped it, in 1996, with no knowledge of page rank, citation analysis, or bibliometrics, for an internal/external search engine for the Envirolink web site. Envirolink was a directory of environmental web sites, so they already had a list of URLs to crawl. The reason it was feasible to build was that it was a fairly constrained list of URLs, it wasn't the entire web. I didn't really know what I was doing (I was 17), but it was an awesome unpaid summer internship. There were two parts of the search engine - a crawler and the search engine. Both were written in Perl.

steve1977

No mention of RankDex?

mpalmer

All credit to you for writing this yourself! PageRank, at its core, symbolizes these basic properties. This isn't what "symbolizes" means. You could use "embodies", "satisfies", "models", etc.