Al Hoang

Jeremy Zawodny proclaims PageRank is dead. For those that don’t know. PageRank is the base algorithm that google bases its rankings on. In an algorithms class that I took we covered the original algorithm of PageRank which I thought was really cool. The idea is very neat but does use some heavy lineaer algebra and recursive calculations to shake out all of those links it discovers and create a rank.
The ensuing discussion on Jeremy’s blog got me thinking about this… I think I agree with most of the folk that PageRank is NOT dead. It’s merely evolved. I have not seen anyone come up with a better base algorithm and publish it yet.
This reminds me of when I was talking with a young geek that worked at Ximian. He proclaimed the OS wars dead. Yeah… whatever. Might as well proclaim Von Neumann architectures dead. Some things are just become fundamental building blocks that many other things are built upon. Those things only become dead when you read about them in history books and keeping those ideas alive requires more work than the usefulness they give.

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