europeforvisitors - 6:10 am on Jul 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

By publishing their methods at the outset instead of just quietly producing better results they should have anticipated that it would result in a cottage industry of gaming the system.

The PageRank formula was published as an academic paper when Google's co-founders were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford. So it's hard to imagine how it could have been suppressed when Google became a company.

[www-db.stanford.edu...]