The Genius Dilemma | Hacker News Reader

The Genius Dilemma

newsweek.com

43 pointsigriot6 comments

Single page:

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/the-genius-dilemma.print....

I was actually just about to comment on Newsweek's great use of javascript in their "view as single page" link at the bottom of the article. No page reload so you get to keep reading right from where you were.

"So Page—so integral to what makes Google Google that its central PageRank algorithm is named for him—is pushing his way into the CEO job, leaving Schmidt as chairman."

Really? I was always under the impression that PageRank got its name because, you know, it ranked pages. Is there more of a story behind the naming?

From http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html :

    The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™,
    and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and
    gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's
    not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google
    co-founder Larry Page.

(Edited to remove the snark. Sorry, it's been a long day and it isn't over.)

I can't tell which one is the joke.

The explanation is similar to the name pg gave to the markup language for Viaweb, RTML:

>We made up various explanations for what Rtml was supposed to stand for, but actually I named it after Robert Morris, the other founder of Viaweb, whose username is Rtm.

source: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

I had to look that one up too. According to http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html, it's actually named after Larry Page.

Of course, that could just be some Google humor. I would guess that PageRank is named for the obvious reason, but that it won out over other names for the connection to the co-founder.

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