[Ar-Curunir]

Lol do you know PageRank? At its core it's just a random walk on a graph; this stuff is taught in intro linear algebra courses. Of course, modelling the web this way and tweaking the middle to produce optimum results was a big deal. You'd be a fool to believe that PageRank hasn't evolved in 20 yrs.

[theli0nheart]

> Lol do you know PageRank?

Oh, please. This back-and-forth and condescending attitude is getting so tiring for me. Yes, I've read the paper multiple times.

> this stuff is taught in intro linear algebra courses

I graduated with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Yale. I'm familiar with this stuff, thanks.

> At its core it's just a random walk on a graph;

I'm tired of making this point. There is a big difference between understanding a ground-breaking discovery and making the discovery itself.

> Of course, modelling the web this way and tweaking the middle to produce optimum results was a big deal. You'd be a fool to believe that PageRank hasn't evolved in 20 yrs.

I never once said this. I said that after PageRank was developed, most of Google's engineering resources went into scaling and monetization.

[Ar-Curunir]

Scaling has its own set of algorithmic challenges; at the small scale there's not much to be gained from asymptotic complexity improvements, but at the scales Google operates at it definitely is the case; I'd wager that a lot of work Google does on its distributed computing platforms involves algorithmic challenges.