Slashdot Mirror

Pagerank has some pretty good information publically available:

Pagerank Explained

That at least covers a big chunk of what Google does.

Why does this website think it can sue a company for a service it is providing them for free?

Furthermore, pagerank is explained here and here. Finally, if 70% of their audience and 80% of their revenue SOLELY relies on Google, then they need to change the way they advertise their site and profit from it. Looking at their site, they look just like a plain directory of links; they probably make money from advertising.

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

I read this article and I thought it was somewhat misleading. Although there were places where it mentioned that Link Exchanges could be bad. It gave me the impression that the more the better.

There is a really good site http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
that tries to explain exactly how bad these link exchanges can be (at least from the Google perspective).

Agreed...PageRank has already been published in a journal, there's a good description of it here. Unfortunately it's patented...just releasing this patent would be a huge contribution.

They've done an awful lot of proprietary development on top of PageRank, which is actually a pretty simple algorithm. It probably wouldn't hurt them all that much if they released the patent, and the algorithm could be used in a lot of other ways...I thought of one the other day, which is why I hunted up the link. If they want to make a contribution, that'd be a great one.

I did read somewhere that they don't actually own the algorithm, though...their old university does. Don't know the exact legal status of it.

It's a strange quirk of human nature that we form nostalgic attachments to old junk. Somehow the fond memories of an old car get converted into reluctance to part with a trembling rust bucket that leaves pools of oil in your driveway. Through some fault of thinking I have several old, useless 486 PCs taking up space in storage. What matters with google is not the hardware they got for free, or waxing nostalgic about data centers cluttered with 28K modems and piles of keyboards and monitors with 1-1 relationships to systems, but rather, the vision and hard work that hardware supported, and the thought, the beautiful algorithmic jazz, expressed in code and data on those old loud slow hunks of silicon and steel. Waxing nostalgic over pictures of old junk ought to be replaced by waxing creative over a close reading of the PageRank algorithm. That would be a more useful expenditure of your time on a saturday morning.

PageRank is just a numerical representation of how popular a page is... it has absolutely nothing to do with content, and is just one of over 100 variables used to calculate rankings. Here's a description of what PageRank is all about:

(Replying to myself): Here is a site that claims to explain Google page rank completely. I found it by doing a Google search on 'google "page rank"', and I assume it's pretty authoritative, because it had the highest page rank :-)

• PageRank explained
• Google's Pagerank and how to make the most of it