Perhaps she's not well known because her contribution to search engines can be summed up like this: "if a word appears a lot in a document, but not in other documents, it's probably important to the content of this document". I'm not sure such an insight really deserves to be credited to anyone, let alone yield an obituary in the New York times. It seems very obvious to me and the sort of thing that would occur to anyone writing a search engine but ...
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
... ah :(
Perhaps Sparck Jones' death went unremarked in the New York Times at the time because she is, in fact, unremarkable? She died in 2007 having spent a lifetime in academia, and the above rule seems to be the only thing she's known for (according to Wikipedia). It appears that the only reason she's getting an obituary now is because she's a woman and Nellie Bowles (who appears to write specifically about gender in the tech industry [1]) wanted to write an article about a female computer scientist.
Will we get an article about overlooked male primary school teachers now? I am doubting it.
[1] https://www.wweek.com/technology/2018/03/12/while-startups-i...