The research paper that launched the Google empire (opens in new tab)

Interestingly, Larry Page was reluctant to publish this infamous research paper when it was first conceived. Much of Larry's thinking was inspired by Nikola Tesla's life; a genius whose inventions were often mocked upon and stolen by Thomas Edison. It was Larry's research advisor who convinced him to publish the paper.

Other interesting sites:-

Google Search Engine in 1997: http://backrub.tjtech.org/1997/index.htm

Explanation of PageRank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

BackRub research (which ultimiately led to PageRank): http://backrub.tjtech.org/1997/backrub.htm

lol@"Sorry, many services are unavailable due to a local network faliure beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up soon. 12/4/97"

For a clever variation on PageRank using vision-based page segmentation, see:

http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=754

For a more sophisticated web page similarity measure inspired by PageRank, see:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~glenj/simrank.pdf

For a ton of very cool papers on these sorts of topics, check out:

http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/aux/index-en.html

"Link spam is used to increase the ranking of certain target web pages by misleading the connectivity-based ranking algorithms in search engines. In this paper we study how web pages can be interconnected in a spam farm in order to optimize rankings. We also study alliances, that is, interconnections of spam farms. Our results identify the optimal structures and quantify the potential gains. In particular, we show that alliances can be synergistic and improve the rankings of all participants. We believe that the insights we gain will be useful in identifying and combating link spam."

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~zoltan/publications/gyongyi2005link.pdf

It's interesting that most web 2.0 services do not appear deep in any theoretical sense. In particular, 99% probably do not have anything that comes even close to the sophistication behind the PageRank algorithm.

But still, some web 2.0 services have become very popular.

It seems that if you do not have any sophisticated algorithms behind your approach, you can still succeed if you are the first to address a need (even if you do it in the most naive way imaginable) and you get sufficient publicity.

The vast majority of people could care less about sophisticated algorithms. The vast majority of people do not obsess over whether an approach is prone to spam.