Josep M. Pujol: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Let me tell you what it means to think about what I know, and then you can correct me. I thought it worked well at the beginning and then it became subject to a lot of adversarial attacks with SEO of 1000000 kinds. And now I would still assume that it has some power, but that it has had to be updated a lot of times in a lot of ways to counteract all these SEO Okay. You will. Optimizations. Okay. I already was an adult at the university. I was just starting to do a PhD when Google came out. Right? I started using Google when it was not even google.com. It was a Stanford. They released 2 papers. 1 was the PageRank, which was like a proper scientific paper, and the other was like a technical report, like the anatomy of a large search engine, where it had the meat of why Google was so good. Google was not good because of Patreon. Patreon was a gimmick. It was a gimmick that worked, of course, had a contribution, but was good because it had a, it was an algorithm and it had a paper on it that was published. And it was something that journalists love to, to stress. Right? The algorithm that does that changes everything. That's what people want to hear. Right? People want to hear a story that there's, like, an invention that does that there's, like, a straight line. There is, something happened and we went from here to here. That's not what happened. In reality, things are, like, a a little bit more the the reason why Google was so good from the get go is because of anchor text. Larry and Sergey through Stanford, were the first ones who, using Stanford resources, were able to crawl the whole web crawl the whole web brute force. And that's why you will see, like, there are some pictures having, like, hard drives on Lego structures. Right? Because they had to buy so many hard drives to be able to store the whole web that they did not have, like, iron to put it. So they actually had to create, like, lego stands for it. Right? So the project was like that where they were able to, like, crawl the whole web. What does it mean to crawl the whole web? Then suddenly, unlike AltaVista, right, you had a much better representation of what the page is. Right? Because you have the backlinks. And the backlinks, what does it say? It basically has the anchor text. It's basically like everybody else's description of your site as opposed to what we had before, which was like your own description of what your site does. Remember, noise is everything. Noise reduction is everything. What is less noisy? The content of the web page or the summary that thousand different people do about your page? Right? It's it's much less noisy than anchor text. And that's why they were able to actually have much better recall with much better precision. And then, you know, like, what okay. Once you have the anchor text, you have the backlinks, and the backlinks have adjacency matrix. With adjacency matrix you can calculate the first eigenvector to which is like a stationary state of random walk, yada yada yada, very nice paper, out. But that's like cherry on top of the cake. The real myth was their ability to brute force the, something that wasn't possible couple of years before to actually brute force and crawl the whole web in a single file system. And then the realization, very smart, hey. We have a much cleaner representation of what the page is than the page content. ore to actually brute force and crawl the whole web in a single file system. And then the realization, very smart, hey. We have a much cleaner representation of what the page is than the page content. Right? That's what makes Google.…

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