> but this is possibly the most important patent of the last 30 years
It is an interesting struggle to figure out what my objection to that point is. I think it is that we know exactly how hard it is to apply linear algebra to a problem - not everyone's cup of tea, but easily 10% of software engineers would be able to do it.
The truly groundbreaking part of Google was never the indexing - that was a problem that was going to get solved one way or another. The groundbreaking part is figuring out that search + low latency + advertising is a money printing machine and that tech favours the winner.
The mechanism to achieve search + low latency + advertising is important but to some degree unimpressive. If the other search engines at the time had realised the payoffs and how important latency was they'd have gone short text-only ads too and put more engineering time into the problem - maybe someone other than Google would be the search engine of the day.
And even if PageRank was the difference between Google and a hypothetical runner up, the difference of a better algorithm would be marginal. Decisive, but ultimately marginal.
It is an interesting struggle to figure out what my objection to that point is. I think it is that we know exactly how hard it is to apply linear algebra to a problem - not everyone's cup of tea, but easily 10% of software engineers would be able to do it.
The truly groundbreaking part of Google was never the indexing - that was a problem that was going to get solved one way or another. The groundbreaking part is figuring out that search + low latency + advertising is a money printing machine and that tech favours the winner.
The mechanism to achieve search + low latency + advertising is important but to some degree unimpressive. If the other search engines at the time had realised the payoffs and how important latency was they'd have gone short text-only ads too and put more engineering time into the problem - maybe someone other than Google would be the search engine of the day.
And even if PageRank was the difference between Google and a hypothetical runner up, the difference of a better algorithm would be marginal. Decisive, but ultimately marginal.