Stanford Researchers Make PageRank Better

from the gunning-for-a-job? dept

Google's famous PageRank system was developed by (and named after) Google's founder Larry Page, along with co-founder Sergei Brin, while they were grad students at Stanford. They had created a system that would allow for a much better search system than Yahoo was using - which seemed fitting, since they were really following in the footsteps of two other Stanford grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, who started Yahoo a few years earlier. Now, two more Stanford grad students are looking to improve on Google's own PageRank methodology, to the point where they say they can run PageRank calculations five times as fast as Google (under certain conditions - which they admit might not be all that realistic). They say that the faster PageRank calculations could be very useful in narrowing down searches quickly, by determining which sites were relevant, and running new PageRank calculations within a subset of sites. So, now the question is whether or not these two grad students will go on to found their own company or (much more likely) are really just gunning for jobs at a pre-IPO Google.