Thu 10 Aug 2006
But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. – Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, developers of Google
Call me a nut, but I don’t blame the founders of Google for selling out on their high-minded ideals. While my integrity is theoretically worth more than any amount of money, my aesthetic ideals are not. For even a tiny fraction of ownership in Google I would quickly abandon my sense of search engine purity.
And I’m glad they did, because once Google established a trustworthy reputation as an uncomprimising search results producer, their ability to advertise became enormous. It’s that power that we use at EveryStudent.com and GodLovesRussia.com to find people who are searching for spiritual truth.
Here is my other favorite quote from this paper:
PageRank … can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.
Of course! Why didn’t I think of that earlier! Now I’ll just go fix that low Page Rank of mine that I’ve been dealing with.
