Original Google Algorithm from Stanford

Posted by Miles Evans

Wow it almost seems retro in some strange way. Keep in mind this stuff dates back to the days when Yahoo! had a gray background and we were all busy building keyword stuffed pages to our hearts content.

Surely you've read and reread The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page? I'm surprised I don't see this link dropped more. So yeah, this is the original Stanford paper from 1997 that started the Google phenomenon and put so many of us on a permanent vacation. Well sorta.

The photo in the caption here is from Stanford University. It's not nearly as fun to look at as this one is.

If you are even remotely interested in SEO/SEM, search or even Google’s share prices, you should really digest this paper. Put it in the John (where I do all my best reading). The essay covers the original concept of PageRank, scale, link structure, and even advertising concerns:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. 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.

Check out these photos of the original Google computer and hip Lego case mod again from Stanford.

Here is the Internet Archives complete cache of Google search pages. This one below is from Dec, 1998 and is the earliest on record that I could find aside from the Stanford prototype.

Here is some Google mantra chatter called Uniquely Google by Rich Schobles, also from Stanford. Who remembers reading this type of stuff back in 2000 and thinking damn I want a pool table in my office too?

The National Science Foundation has a more detailed look at the Google pairs' early garage days.

So again here is the main page of The Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project of which Brin, Page and other notaries were members. Sadly most of the beefier white papers here are passworded.

Hit me with your digg stick!

Posted Apr 07, 2006 at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!