Just image being famous only for being 44 years too early to a party.
The downside of "Katz centrality" compared to PageRank appears to be that if if a big node links to many many nodes, all of those earn a lot of reputation, regardless of how outgoing links there are:
University of Chicago research group by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26This is the family of algorithms to which PageRank
Open PageRank implementation and data by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26This section is about more "open" PageRank implementations, notably using either or both of:
- open source software
- open web crawling data such as Common Crawl
As of 2025, the most open and reproducible implementation appears to be whatever Common Crawl web graph official PageRank does, which is to use WebGraph. It's quite beautiful.
École Polytechnique alumnus of 2009 by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26 École Polytechnique alumnus of 1983 by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26In 2017 apparently they've started making their own Web Graphs, i.e. they parse the HTML and extract the graph of what links to what.
This is exactly what we need for an open implementation of PageRank.
Edit: actually, they already calculate PageRank for us!!! Fantastic!!! Main section: Section "Common Crawl web graph official PageRank".
The graphs are dumped in BVGraph format.
A quick exploration of the graph can be seen at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/198
Their source code is at: github.com/commoncrawl/cc-webgraph
École Polytechnique alumnus by year by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 2025-02-26École Polytechnique students identify their academic year, or "promotion" in French, by start year date.
For example, Ciro Santilli's year started in 2009, though as a foreign student he arrived only at the start of 2010, and Ciro's promotion is usually known just as X09. And as the century barrier is broken we'll start to need to specify as X2009 one day.
List of notable alumni:
- fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_d%27élèves_de_l%27École_polytechnique This French list is a bit better as you'd expect
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_alumni
A quick hands-on introduction to the software by Ciro Santilli can be found at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/198
The native file format of WebGraph.
It is a binary format and highly storage efficient.
It is for example what Common Crawl web graph currently dumps to as of 2025, see e.g.: data.commoncrawl.org/projects/hyperlinkgraph/cc-main-2024-25-dec-jan-feb/index.html
TODO meaning of "BV"?
A quick hands-on introduction to the format by Ciro Santilli can be found at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/198
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact