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You could have invented PageRank

https://praveshkoirala.com/2026/08/26/you-could-have-invented-pagerank/
29•pkoird•1h ago

Comments

jmkd•49m ago
One is reminded of Damien Hirst's famed retort to a critic who said "Well I could have pickled a shark" ... "But you didn't, did you. I did."
jaggederest•35m ago
Reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech, where he talked about the man in the arena:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbon...

smcg•45m ago
Well, I was a child in 1996, so probably not.

Tying relevancy to link frequency was definitely a novel idea at the time, even if it seems "obvious" or simple in retrospect.

inigyou•41m ago
Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today - you need something else. It was one of many possible ranking hacks, and one that worked at the particular time in that particular state of the web where nobody was gaming links because PageRank didn't exist yet. Maybe you could invent a good ranking algorithm for the modern internet, perhaps just the reciprocal of the number of ads on the page, minus its AI detector score, but probably not that.

Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.

montag•17m ago
Really?? And not BrinRank?
jjice•15m ago
> Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.

I've always taken it as a happy double play since it is named after Page, but also ranks pages.

fbd_0100•6m ago
His name may have influenced him to make his career from ranking pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

ianbooker•40m ago
PageRank is fascinating, since it is so easy to explain.

Yet, this is not even half the work. It like a third of the way.

Before you could have invented PageRank, you must think in graphs. That is possible in 1996, but not as widespread as today.

After you invented PageRank, you still need to deploy it. Again, possible but challenging as well. Is Python performant enough in 96? Can you afford more than 4MB RAM?

At least Lego will not sue you for using their bricks to build a server rack in 1996.

lproven•20m ago
Yup. I was there, using the web, back then. I used Altavista dozens of times a day. It wasn't very good.

I never thought of it.

I never thought of the Million Dollar Homepage, either.

It's still there! https://milliondollarhomepage.com/

I remember the first ever HTML CV (résumé) being published.

I am Slashdot user #6030. I used it for ages before I created a user account.

I was already paying for my own personal email address in 1991 when timbl revealed the WWW to the world. I thought it was a gimmick. It'd never catch on. We already had Gopher and Archie and Veronica.

deep sigh

lindig•18m ago
How do you compute page rank for billion of pages that have cyclic links? Is that not the problem right after the initial idea?
jmalicki•14m ago
That is not at all a problem. Links dampen their effect and you run it until convergence - read the paper. It's no different than summing an infinite convergent series, $\sum_{i=0}^n a^{-n}$.

Also, WTF, it seems impossible to find a PDF of the original paper still on the web without a paywall.

hluska•4m ago
You’re underestimating the difficulty - actually downloading, parsing and updating the system with billions of pages was a very hard thing in the 1990s.
truthbe•5m ago
If I had received funding from DARPA, and NASA, perhaps I could have.

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