 How will the world change when the PageRank patent expires?
vannevar: Not much, PageRank was never the brilliant innovation it was made out to be. It was a nice improvement ca 1998 but Google has spent most of the last ten years throwing patches at the problem of people gaming the system. They've been the Red Queen, running faster and faster to stay in place. In terms of actually finding what you're looking for, I don't think Google today is much better than it was then, which is maybe twice as good as Alta Vista 1998. Search engine scalability has come a long way, but search engine results have improved little.