PageRank: It’s not “magic”
I’d argue that the core of Google’s innovation - the PageRank idea - was of a purely social character… based on realising the limitations of the engineering efforts of the likes of Altavista in machine based semantic analysis. The relatively simple counting the backlinks is not exactly an engineering tour de force. Nor is the realisation that links are social gestures. Larry Page is not a geek. He’s much smarter than that.
Originally posted as a comment by Emil Sotirov on Union Square Ventures using Disqus.
Glad to see other folks making this point. Many, especially folks in marketing, act like the technology at the core of GOOG search is some black box. As Emil points out, this couldn’t be further than the truth; all the information (links) is in public view. Every SERP is really a result of peer-production (organized and displayed ex post facto).
