Let’s try a little thought experiment in technology-fiction: what would have happened if Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PageRank, back in 1998, had failed to attract its first investors? Google didn’t invent the search engine: there were plenty of them before, from AltaVista, Excite, Lycos or others who were counting words on pages and selling their results page to the highest bidder, to catalog or portal concepts such as Yahoo! or AOL, that attempted to capture the users’ attention as much as they could to be able to serve them advertising, the more the better. Imagine if these concepts would have gone the distance, and deprived us of the web that resulted from Google’s easy and efficient way of searching … 

What did Larry Page and Sergey Brin realize? They adapted and extended the citation index (or its consequence, the citation impact), a system that they knew worked for academic literature (remember, these guys were graduate students working on their Ph.D., and thus reading academic papers like there was no tomorrow!), and moved it into a new context: the web. They realized there was an underused signal, relationships among pages, and used it to generate a metric, weighting links according to the importance of the pages providing them, that not only allowed them to index the web, but also to define attention as a social construct: a page is important when other pages link to it with a certain term. 

As I’ve said several times, corporate AI is completely different from individual AI : companies don’t need just answers to questions, what they need is persistent memory and state, feedback learning loops, embedded cybersecurity, logs that can be tracked and not manipulated , etc.

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