Google PageRank-like algorithm dates back to 1941

(PhysOrg.com) -- When Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed their PageRank algorithm for ranking webpages in 1998, they certainly knew that the seeds of the algorithm had been sown long before that time, as is evident from their paper's references. But the Google founders may not have known just how far back PageRank's predecessors reach - nearly 70 years, according to Massimo Franceschet, who dug up a 1941 paper with a similar ranking method, as well as several other pre-Google papers with algorithms that show remarkable similarities to PageRank. Yet Brin and Page may have expected as much; after all, as Franceschet notes, the motto of Google Scholar is "Stand on the shoulders of giants."

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