You know Google is getting pervasive when it starts ranking plant & animal life.
Ecologist Dr. Stefano Allesina realized he could determine the keystones in coextinction, or the loss of one species upon the extinction of another, by reversing Google’s algorithm.
“In PageRank, a web page is important if important pages point to it. In our approach a species is important if it points to important species,” said Allesina. “If we can find the way of removing species so that the destruction of the ecosystem is the fastest, it means we’re ranking species by their importance.” In other words, plants like grass which feed grazing animals, and consequently the predators that prey on those grazers, rank high. Humans not so much.
