You might not think that Google’s PageRank algorithm, or the Internet at large for that matter, would have much to do with chemistry besides maybe helping you to find some chemistry content. In actuality, the two are far more similar than you might imagine. Google’s PageRank indexes webpages by the way they cohere to each other through hyperlinks and chemistry is concerned with the way molecules cohere through chemical bonds. Not that different, right? That’s what Aurora Clark, associate professor of Chemistry at Washington State University thinks, which is why she’s using PageRank as a jumping off point for moleculaRnetworks, a sort of chemistry emulator.

As of today, Google is rolling out a modification to the standard Google search we all know and love. From here on out, your vanilla Google search will also include personal results from your Google+ account. Obviously, if you don’t have a Google+ account, this isn’t going to affect you too much; but even if you have one you don’t frequently use it, you’ll probably start noticing a few changes. The three big elements as Google lays them out are the addition of Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages.

Ever since Google+ opened up for public use, had a huge traffic spike, and then dropped back off, the social network has continued to take a backseat to Facebook for most. Google+ does have it’s faithful users however, and Google is in no way throwing in the towel when it comes to updating the network and making it more and more appealing for the people who use it, and the people who might be interested in coming back to revive their idle account.

One of the newest and definitely the most interesting of these improvements is “Ripples.” By viewing a public post’s ripples, you get access to a whole bunch of information that all social networks collect, but generally keep close to their chests. Not only can you see who shared what with who, growing out in a series of concentric circles, but you can also go back and replay the sharing in scaled time, so you can actually watch how something blew up, even if you didn’t catch it until it was already big.

So, you’re from the internet, you probably have at least a casual interest in tech companies. You know, who bought whom and who came from where via asexual corporate reproduction. If you do have a casual interest, or even a voracious interest, The Interconnected World of Tech Companies infographic should help you fill that need and quench your ravenous brain-thirst. The graphic shows different tech companies as dots (seemingly according to size) and their connections to others by shared founders or acquisition. A lot of it seems pretty straight forward, but I bet you’ll find some connections you weren’t aware of and notice that some of the big guys have less family members than you might think. Full image after the jump, of course.

The webcomic XKCD dropped another Internet truism when it proclaimed in the alt-text of its latest comic:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

Someone took it as a challenge, and put together a “useful” little tool that will show you, with links, exactly how many clicks it takes to get from the subject of your choice to the Wikipedia article on philosophy. It certainly is eye-opening, and is certain to keep folks entertained for quite some time.

The real question is if anyone has yet proved XKCD wrong. 20 steps was my longest chain, who can beat it?

Update: Geekosystem reader Andrew has found one that breaks the chain: “numerary” first links to “supernumerary,” which first links to “numerary” … and so on. What other combo breakers exist?

(XKCD Wikipedia Steps to Philosophy)