[Sigia-l] "Best Bets" or "Accidental Thesaurus" Examples?

[Richard Wiggins]

Gee, this crowd is a tough house.  :-)

I wondered if someone would quibble about cities.  Larry Page and Sergey
Brin were at Stanford when they invented Google.  Of course the algorithms
have been tweaked since the company set up shop in Mountain View, but the
guts of the PageRank scheme were born when they were in school at Stanford. 
I guess Stanford is technically in Stanford, CA, not Palo Alto.  I doubt the
sales office in Detroit or Dallas has much to do with engineering tweaks to
the scoring algorithm.  The Palo Alto / East Lansing reference was inside
baseball; Larry Page grew up in East Lansing, and his late father was a
distinguished professor of computer science at Michigan State.

And I understand full well that their ranking algorithm is more than link
popularity.  I stand by what I said about the best seller phenomenon
applying to Google.  Go to Google and do a search on:

 google september 11

... and check out the first hit on the list.  It got there due to the weight
given to blog links.

The original paper at Stanford describing Google still makes fascinating
reading, by the way:

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

/rich

On Mon, 26 August 2002, christina wodtke wrote:

> 
> 
> > of their hit list is a function of a scoring algorithm chosen in Palo
Alto
> 
> Mountain View. (Also New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit,
> Boston, Dallas, and even Canada, UK, Japan Germany and France)
> 
> > and the happenstance of how many people link to a given page. 
(Indeed,
> > Google is the ultimate example of a search engine that gives high
credence
> > to "best sellers".)
> 
> This algorithm is more complex that that. that's just the part they'll talk
> about. I was just at a search engine conference and they were impressively
> tight-lipped about the content of their algorithm.
> 
> 
> 
> Just a FYI.
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____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com