To complete before meeting
- ✅ Read Brin/Page paper on Google architecture, identify ideas for followup
- ✅ Watch short video on Page Rank simulation, hand trace Random Surfer
See Ed post for more detail on above tasks.
Further resources
If you have some extra time and unsated curiosity, here is some additional reading to peruse. The books can be accessed from the Stanford Library digital collection (click the link below, authenticate with your Stanford sunet, and find link to full book in section labeled "Available online").
- Tim Bray (inventor of XML) has a nice series of blog posts on search engine architecture https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/30/OnSearchTOC
- Sergey Brin and Larry Page's landmark paper introducing Google at the 1998 WWW7 Conference in 1998. "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
- The Wikipedia page on PageRank is good overview (although gets a little math-y) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
- Amy Langville and Carl Meyer, Google's PageRank and Beyond https://doi-org.stanford.idm.oclc.org/10.1515/9781400830329
- The paper that started it all: Larry Page's "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web" http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
- Some short articles from popular press on ethical issues raised by search, result filtering/ranking, SEO (seach engine optimization):
- "Google algorithms blamed for bias in results shown to CA voters", https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/10/29/google-algorithms-blamed-for-giving-california-voters-a-biased-look-at-ballot-initiatives-1332651
- "Fundamentals of Ethical SEO", https://www.samwoolfe.com/2020/12/fundamentals-of-ethical-seo.html
- "Google is finally admitting it has a filter-bubble problem" https://qz.com/1194566/google-is-finally-admitting-it-has-a-filter-bubble-problem/
- "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html
- Latest update on antitrust case against Google https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/technology/justice-dept-case-google-search-dominance.html
- Wikipedia on Google bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing