Microsoft covets LinkedIn algorithms

Microsoft yesterday announced it would buy the business social network LinkedIn for a company acquisition record of $26.2 billion, a purchase triggered by Microsoft's appetite for algorithms, an analyst argued.
"There are two components to LinkedIn that Microsoft wanted," said Jenny Sussin, a Gartner research director, in an interview. "One is the data component, the other is the algorithm component."
An algorithm is a set of operations that tells a computer what calculations to run on what dat