06 November 2002 | Author: Heather Luscombe

A little birdie told me...

With the whole online marketing world chippering on about PageRank as if it was the answer to eternal life, here's some light relief on the subject, from an unusual source.

Google's own site contains a page claiming "The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™"

"Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools"

The site then lists some highly amusing "FAQ's", including:

What are the challenges of operating so many pigeon clusters (PCs)?

and

Aren't pigeons really stupid? How do they do this?

and our favourite:

Isn't it cruel to keep pigeons penned up in tiny data coops?

Got time on your hands at Google guys?

http://www.google.com / technology / pigeonrank.html

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