I’ve just spent a bit of time reading google’s initial proposal. I’ve found it pretty interesting because we’ve just finished up a bunch of string theory stuff in my data structures course. One of my favourite bits:
[A] PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation.
They have a nice little linear time algorithm that they’re using. Those kind of statistics are pretty impressive considering that this paper was published a couple of years ago.