I find it weird that this was published in 2007 but the first sentence is "Some months ago newspapers all around the world considered Google’s plan to go public", and that happened in 2004.
It could have been an internal document that was published a few years after written. This could be due to a indecision on whether or not to publish the work. This document could also be originally for internal use to educate new hires.
Page Rank is an incredibly elegant algorithm.
But in practice I suppose that the actual Google search algorithm has little resemblance with the mathematically elegant PR algorithm, because, it has to implement many custom tweaking, tuning, DMCA black-lists, right to be forgotten list, etc ...
It's like "machine learning" a spam filter, isn't it? It sounds so simple and elegant, and then somehow you end up with 200 rules, most of which are entirely manual, and weekly tweaks to keep it working well.
One nice thing is that this algorithm is very amendable to being augmented with additional data. For example if your initial adjacency matrix gave equal weight to each outgoing link, nothing is stopping you from measuring the actual "transition probabilities" by pervasive tracking / custom DNS servers such as 8.8.8.8 and so on. Moreover it is also easy to generate a personalised model for an individual user by recording their activity over time and using that to predict transition probabilities for websites they might never have visited. In that way you can generate a filter bubble.
You make it sound so ominous, and the result would in fact be a large positive, rather than a negative.
I mean sure, this would require some metrics as to which links are actually followed versus which ones won't, but there's no need for "pervasive tracking". Google could just get these from it's own employees, or indeed try to extract some of these metrics from 8.8.8.8 (ie. from volunteers)
Given how big Google is, I'm sure the answer is "all of the above", but the end result is: Google places the page where you eventually end up finding what you want high on the search results page. And it does this by getting tiny amounts of help for you from millions of others, anonymously.
So we have no reason to assume any of the methods are nefarious, and the end result of it is definitely useful. More of this, please !
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] threadI mean sure, this would require some metrics as to which links are actually followed versus which ones won't, but there's no need for "pervasive tracking". Google could just get these from it's own employees, or indeed try to extract some of these metrics from 8.8.8.8 (ie. from volunteers)
Given how big Google is, I'm sure the answer is "all of the above", but the end result is: Google places the page where you eventually end up finding what you want high on the search results page. And it does this by getting tiny amounts of help for you from millions of others, anonymously.
So we have no reason to assume any of the methods are nefarious, and the end result of it is definitely useful. More of this, please !