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A comment on Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets. Parent comment

Re:Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About... by zaidf on Saturday December 19, 2009 @02:01PM (#1005010)
With PageRank, I think google gets a lot of leverage from misinformation, which can be as important as the information.

Few people really know much about PageRank beyond the general idea. In Google's case, I think they talked about PageRank more because they had written a paper on it and it was already public whether they talked or not.

But if you observe, beyond the original paper, little is known about PageRank from Google. There are plenty of guesses--right and wrong--that can be pieced together to form a narrative of the changes and evolution in PageRank. But nothing official from Google. And probably for a reason.

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Re:Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About... by gruseom on Saturday December 19, 2009 @02:10PM (#1005022)
Yes, and not only PageRank: they've done the same thing with BigTable, GFS, etc. They're masters of selective disclosure. Two things one often hears about Google is how open they are and how secretive they are, and what's remarkable is that both are true.
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