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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this just a huge load of crap? I thought every time one of these got posted, 5 people from open source projects Apple basically funds chimed in and said, "just because Apple didn't rename it Apple KHTML doesn't mean they aren't key contributors".

You know what else isn't open source? PageRank. Shut up, CNet.

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PageRank is an algorithm. (Although it does piss me off that it's patented)

Ok I'm guessing that there's more than a little bit of code that actually runs that algorithm.

Honestly, probably just a little bit. It's not that complex of an algorithm. The really complex stuff is MapReduce.

Can we just agree that there is quite a bit of Google code that is unlikely to ever be open-sourced? =)

Reddit's open source code excludes the crown jewels of anti-cheating/spam protection. It's their IP.

Seems more likely that it's just that they don't want spammers and cheaters to know what their defenses are.

Whoever voted that down has never looked at PageRank seriously. You can implement it in a few hundred lines of code using Page's paper from when he was at Stanford.

PageRank-Stanford-version might not be much code, but as I understand it, that's almost irrelevant to current search results which are much more complex.

Certainly. I suppose it depends on whether you see PageRank as a specific algorithm (as I think most people reading papers on search algorithms do) or "the thing that powers Google's search results". My point was that the original comment wasn't just stupid.

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