The Linear Algebra Behind Google (2006) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Linear Algebra Behind Google (2006) [pdf]

rose-hulman.edu

96 pointssonabinu12 comments

This looks like a fun paper to read but the HN title should have "(2006)" in it.

The author provides a Maple Notebook and a Mathmatica Notebok for this paper here:

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/google.html

Does google even use this still?

I was under the impression that people started to "game" this system (SEO) so much that the Markov-chain approach essentially got useless.

Also, how does user-specific ranking get into the mix? Google is storing our data for a reason, right?

It's surely still in there but there are by now on the order of hundreds of additions, tweaks and heuristics that have accumulated over the years. See for example this Google blog entry: http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2008/05/introduction-to-google...

"We have designed Google to be scalable in the near term to a goal of 100 million web pages. We have just received disk and machines to handle roughly that amount."

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a

>Indeed, due to Google's prominence as a search engine, its ranking system has had a deep influence on the development and structure of the internet, and on what kinds of information and services get accessed most frequently.

Did anyone else feel uncomfortable after reading this sentence?

Sure, but it seems inevitable that some major player from the late 90's/ early 00's would have a significant influence on the state of the internet in 2015. I'm happier with where Google has brought us than if, say, Yahoo or AOL had been the leader during this time period.

That said, Google has helped bring us where we are today. It's still a fairly young internet, I imagine. Where should we take it? Google will remain an influential shaper of the internet for a while yet, but Google still doesn't control it.

How would you like to see the internet develop over the next ~25 years?

"Did anyone else feel uncomfortable after reading this sentence?"

Henry Ford dominated the way cars were produced by creating the assembly line. So not really. The fact the line could not stop for any reason until the car is finished helped the decline of US car quality. [0]

So the question is, "How will google respond over time?"

[0] "NUMMI 2015 – Why are most American cars still not as good as foreign cars? " ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946385

It seems likely that the alternative would be some different but still similarly effective ranking system having a deep influence.

Yes.

In the references there's a link to the original Google description written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

See appendix A.

>googleFinalVersionFixed.pdf

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