Princeton University publishes book on science of google rankings

[roseplant]

I'll just post the whole article here as it's pretty short:

Book on the Science of Google Rankings

Princeton University Press sent in an advance review copy of “Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings” by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer. If you’re looking to write your own search engine, or you’re just interested in the math of PageRank, this book might be of interest. However without advanced math skills, you won’t get past chapter 3, and if you can’t translate math formulas into programming the book also won’t help you with coding. Even though there are a lot of interesting asides, starting with chapter 4 there are also plenty of formulas and calculations like these...



... or sentences like these:



If that doesn’t scare, this academic book might be the best (only?) getting to the core of PageRank math.

Source: Google Blogoscoped

[emz]

G = o(o/g)l^e

[jimkarter]

Wow.. I will surely buy one copy.. I love reading everything and anything about google.

[shauner]

i think this would be a very interesting read... unfortunately my math skills are not at the Princeton U. level, but maybe it would give me incentive to hone my skills... yeah right.

[dsm56]

Ha, ive got an exam on monday called "digital libraries", one of the parts of that is the same sort of thing, although we need to know page rank in terms of graphs and nodes etc...

I hate it so much, although i have to say it is one of the maths topics that has some real life uses

[Smyrl]

I believe that formula has been published online for all to read for a number of years.

[daboss]

Originally Posted by Smyrl

I believe that formula has been published online for all to read for a number of years.

problem is that you need the collective brains of 50 phds to understand it...

[roseplant]

Brin+Page published the formula in a paper they wrote a couple of years ago. It's public domain but it's fairly indecipherable by anyone without a maths PhD.

[temp_12000]

the first article about page rank is still online.

[Troutnut]

You don't need a PhD in math to understand Brin & Page's paper. There only seems to be about one equation and it's an easy one.

Their paper can be found here:

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

It is very out-of-date, since it's from the very start of Google. It's a good introduction to the fundamental idea of PageRank, but it's certainly not a useful reference for the way Google weights subtle page elements and handles optimization now. No book is going to contain those trade secrets.

Here's an interesting quote that shows how old the paper is:

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone
ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising
funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the
consumers.