Google seems to have taken this as a hint, and more of the same having been popping up in the margins of all kinds of otherwise innocuous websites - innocuous except in that they have chosen to make some money by renting out some of their space to Google.
One of Google's offerings brought this picture to mind, seen by us in January 2015 and noticed at reference 2. We were grateful to the Mexican entrepreneur who had made this possible.
But I am pleased to be able to report that in the margins of turning all this up, I learned that, in some contexts at least, you can ask Google to turn particular advertisements off. Which I have done, and we will see.
Also that I have been intrigued in the past few days to read of Google's first steps in the world. Steps which were helped along by their learning how to find the eigenvalues of the very large matrix which describes the links between all the stuff out there on the Internet. With the keywords here being Perron-Frobenius and PageRank. And with the driver here being the notion that a page was more important if lots of other people pointed at it, without any regard for what it might be saying, this last being much harder to pass judgement on. I vaguely remember knowing about this at the time they made the switch, well over a decade ago now.
PS: statistics about the number of websites are much easier to find than statistics about the number of pages, and a lot of what there is marketing orientated, but the answer seems to be that there are around thirty trillion pages. That is to say thirty million million. Can they really find the eigenvalues for a square matrix of this size? Maybe page is not a useful concept in this context any more? Time to read reference 4...
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/last-post-for-tippett.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/01/leighton-house.html.
Reference 3: The Roses of Heliogabalus - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema - 1888.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_page.
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