It’s Search Engine Week here at the Batcave. Now, to be honest, since I started writing on the subject, pretty much every week is Search Engine Week. But this week is Search Engine Week in the sense that I’m reading multiple books on search engines. After the Jeanneney, I’m now into Google’s PageRank and Beyond, a moderately rigorous mathematical discussion of PageRank and Kleinberg’s HITS. The question that it brings to mind is:
Until a few years ago, would you ever in your wildest dreams have thought that one of the most lucrative businesses in the world would be based on computing the eigenvectors of linear operators on billion-dimensional vector spaces?