Larry Page and Sergey Brin have always given Professor Rajeev Motwani significant credit for helping them create what would eventually become Google. Today, as I say my personal goodbye to the man who helped so many people in our community, I’m also spending some time going back and reading some of the early papers that Rajeev co-authored describing how PageRank could become the basis for a new kind of search engine.
In a 1998 paper called “What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket” Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd say “…we have developed a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank based on the link structure of the Web that has properties that are useful for search and navigation..we have used PageRank to develop a novel search engine called Google, which also makes heavy use of anchor text.”
An even earlier paper in 1998 that the four co-authored called “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web” went into much more detail on PageRank. “In this paper, we take advantage of the link structure of the Web to produce a global “importance” ranking of every web page. This ranking, called PageRank, helps search engines and users quickly make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Wide Web.”
Today much of what they wrote appears as little more than common sense. But in 1998 it was a revolutionary way of thinking. AltaVista, the leading search engine at the time, turned down the chance to buy Google for $1 million, saying spam would make PageRank useless. Yahoo also declined to purchase Google, supposedly because they didn’t want to focus on search, which only sent users away from Yahoo.com. So what seems obvious today was considered sort of meh by the leading technologists a decade ago.
The papers are embedded below.
cool. great info for those who do not know the full story.
This is just conjecture. Had Prof. John Kleinberg went commercial with his HITS algorithm which he published in his paper with title :
Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
(similar to PageRank) at around the same time Page & Brin published their paper on PageRank, then I believe that Google wouldn’t be a dominant force in search as we see today.
I would rephrase by saying “Had Prof. Jon Kleinberg *successfully* went commercial…”
The world is littered with better ideas that were either poorly or never executed.
Totally Agree …
Though I do not know you personally, I want to say thank you for guiding the minds of so many to create and develop products and services that affect the lives of everyone today.
May you rest in peace.
Another name who’s had a monumental contribution to mathematical (specifically matrix) computation also from Stanford who had passed away in recent years was Prof. Gene Howard Golub . It was Golub who first developed the SVD (singular value decomposition) algorithm in the 1960s/1970s which is the cornerstone of major scientific computations of today. SVD has been used in various fields, as Physics, Statistics, Mathematics, Social Science, Imaging Processing & Image Recognition, Signal Processing, Spam filtering, Text Search Engine (via LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing), Product Recommendation Engine and many countless applications. Google is reported to be using LSI in conjunction to PageRank in their search engine. PageRank works on link-structure while LSI works on document’s content.
Golub also pioneered the Eigenvalue and matrix decomposition which is also a cornerstone of modern scientific applications of today. Google PageRank algorith is an eigenvalue problem, where its adjacency matrix is solved via the power method decomposition .
Dude, what is your problem?
No problem at all ..
BREAKING NEWS: Mike Arrington got his ass handed to him by Leo Laporte – on the Gillmor Gang.
Google is reported in the following link to be using LSI (latent semantic indexing) in recent years.
Google Latent Semantic Indexing
I don’t know if Google is using the SVD (singular value decomposition) algorithm of Prof. Gene Golub for its LSI (in conjuction with its PageRank) or not, however there aren’t that many alternatives to solving LSI apart from SVD.
Anyway, this blog post is about Prof. Rajeev Motwani and his contribution to web search, so I should say RIP Motwani.
one million dollar mistake
OK, a great guy is dead, can we move on now?
ianubis, get the hell out of here, moron.
Anyone who remotely considers himself a techie (most of this blog readers??) should read Page and Brin’s work on Google – it explains Pagerank, and why it is so important to search:
http://infolab....rub/google.html
I read this piece over and over again (even more than the times I watched Fightclub..), and the foresight these two guys had just keeps amazing me.
The Pagerank idea is what really differentiated Google from other search engines, who did not know how to handle spam, as results for any search, in the pre-Google era, included tons of porn.
Some of the papers which we can say really change the world. Due respect to the man, may be google wouldnt have been google without people like him involved in the early stages.
Peace,
Rahul
It’s great to know that Rajeev has influenced many great brains including those that launched Google. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder wrote on his blog today, “Eventually, as Google emerged from Stanford, Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it”
( http://too.blogspot.com)
May your soul rest in peace!
What happened to Rajeev is a lesson to all those greedy entrepreneurs who made boatloads of money in Silicon Valley that all the money in the world means nothing when the Lord strikes you down.
We should all big up and remember Rajeev’s tremendous contribution to the development of the World Wide Web.
Behind every Showbiz TechStars like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Sergy Brin, there are hundreds of talented behind the scenes extras like Rajeev.
RIP Rajeev.
Thanks for sharing this Mike. Credit where credit is due.
I find the whole circumstances leading to Rajeev’s death very suspicious. There must be a proper investigation.
Point 1. Didn’t Rajeev had two small kids, in that respect, will he allow his swimming pool depth to be more than 5 feet deep at any point. Could someone please confirm the length, breath and depth of the pool.
Point 2: At what time did this happen, where were his family members. Didn’t he shout for help, what were the neighbors doing.
Point 3: It is typical of western corporate media to hush hush the matter without checking the facts. I find it hard to believe, a person with such a high education, would construct a swimming pool and for all these years did not learn to swim.
Point 4: Depending upon the breath of the pool, even with no swimming experience, he could have reached to one side, no matter what the circumstances were. Common it was his home.
It is very hard to digest the news that Rajeev must have fell into his own swimming pool late at night. This is too simplistic and sounds like covering the facts.
It is really a tragic moment for all those who were close to Rajeev. Yet, for the sake of finding the truth, will someone in America, do please think in these lines to find the TRUTH.
Heavy use of anchor text will also make heavy emphasized document headings to the next browser.
The conclusion in the above paper:
“An important lesson we have learned from these experiments is that _size does matter_ ”
Looks like these guys had a lot of fun
Just 47 years old.
Short lived influential life.
May he rest in peace
who said he is resting? The guy is from india…maybe he believed in reincarNATION?
Face reading could tell a bit about the inner nature of the guy….
Thanks for sharing this.
Tribute to the professor. Bows and Salutes.. …
During my masters, I had a chance to read his book “Randomized Algorithm.” He was pioneer in the fields of Theoretical computer science.
RIP.
great guy..i saw his papers..what a brain..
i am suspicious of his death..how come the maid found his body only at 12.30 pm next day? no one saw him missing until then? needs investigation..
This makes it a matter of far more than antiquarian interest whether past philosophers are being correctly understood and whether revisions and modifications of their views are well-motivated or merely the result of misreadings and distortions, blinkered through the influence of intervening prejudices. ,