Sorry for the delay. Disclaimer: I turned the thesis in already but I'm still waiting for my supervisor's feedback. So it might be completely wrong and has not been reviewed until now.
I have not used PageRank to rank search results but to detect monitoring sensors in P2P botnets as part of my master thesis and it worked pretty well. It is quite effective in detecting sensors and the only way to prevent detection is to reduce incoming edges, thereby requiring many sensors to monitor a large botnet.
So the algorithm is still useful not only for search results.
NixOS and Guix do _not_ require static linking. They go even one step further and allow many versions of a dynamic object to exist at the same time and each software on your system chooses, which version of the object to link against.
I extensively use nix-shell if that falls under ad-hoc package management. Together with lorri[0], I can place a `shell.nix` in my project repository and when cd'ing into the folder, I will be dropped in a shell with all project specific dependencies available to me.
The thesis itself can be found here: https://git.vbrandl.net/vbrandl/masterthesis/raw/branch/mast...
Some groundwork I built upon: "SensorBuster: On Identifying Sensor Nodes in P2P Botnets" https://git.vbrandl.net/vbrandl/masterthesis/raw/branch/mast...