Today in 2001, Google co-founder Larry Page was granted a patent for the PageRank search algorithm—“The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it… The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.”
In In the Plex, Steven Levy quotes Sergey Brin: “The idea behind PageRank was that you can estimate the importance of a web page by the web pages that link to it. We actually developed a lot of math to solve that problem…we convert the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the PageRanks of all the web pages, and billions of terms, which are all the links.” And Larry Page: “In a way, how good you are is determined by who links to you and who you link to determines how good you are. It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can solve this.”
Developing a model with millions and billions of variables and applying it to billions and trillions of documents and files is what we today call “AI.”
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