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I never knew PageRank scores were visible, and I never used the web before Google. But this article is so far up its own ass. > Ever gotten a crappy email ask

I never knew PageRank scores were visible, and I never used the web before Google. But this article is so far up its own ass. > Ever gotten a crappy email asking for links? Blame PageRank. Never mind that web rings were around long before Google and used the same tactics. > Ever had garbage comments with link drops? Blame PageRank. There are way more reasons spammers exist than just boosting PageRank. The author is acting like a) Google had less of an influence on the web before PageRank was public information and b) the web was somehow better both back then and before Google existed. There will always be people who want to game search engine results, regardless of how much information they know about their own standing, and the web was pretty much un-navigable pre-Google.

hughw 11y ago
> Never mind that web rings were around long before Google and used the same tactics. If you "never used the web before Google," how would you know this? I suppose you might have read about it. I did use the web before Google, and I don't remember web rings back then. There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages based on the links. I do remember lots of BS meta keywords.
- haberman 11y ago
  I used the web before Google too, and I remember them. Also, I do consider reading about something to be a valid way to learn about things you didn't directly witness, so it's strange that you would discount this. > There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages based on the links. Webrings were useful for people who found a website interesting and wanted to visit other similar websites. The incentive to be in a webring was that you could get more exposure. Not to mention that the 90s were full of trendy things like this: "under construction" gifs, "valid HTML" buttons, etc. Web rings were one of those "clever" things you could add to a website.
  - james-skemp 11y ago
    Having had pages in Webrings way back when, it was definitely about exposure, but I think it was also an extension of groups (Yahoo! Groups being the biggest I can recall, but I think there was also OneGroup (?) - it maybe had purple in it's logo?). With Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, and the like it was fairly easy to get a really basic page up, typically with a bunch of links to pages that you checked on regularly, and might be of interest to others. At least that's how it was for me. I think the rings I was part of included Terragen, POV-Ray, and Star Wars, and I can recall getting a couple people started with basic (and of course very ugly, with that same star field background for the SW-related pages) for people that I met in the various groups. Good times. EDIT: And don't forget the 'made with notepad' icons. Or recommending 800x600 or 1024x768 as the best resolution to view a site.
  - hughw 11y ago
    Fair enough guys. Thanks for reminding me about webrings. I had forgotten them and confused them with common link spam we see now. I do consider first hand memories a more reliable contribution than hearsay (reading about it), but there is some contribution in repeating received wisdom too.
- kolinko 11y ago
  Web rings were all the rage in 1990s/early 2000s, right before Google launched. Unless they were some other kinds of web rings we're talking about.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Web rings enabled access to related content. Definitely a pre-Google thing, I recall them from my introduction to the Web in high school circa 1996-1998 (not certain when I first saw it, but in that range).
sullivandanny 11y ago
So as the author, I'll try to clarify. The article isn't about Google's influence on the web, as a whole. Google has had a huge influence on the web in many ways, from making it easier for people to locate information to sites considering how to speed up their content, to become mobile-friendly or to use secure connections, because Google rewards such things with ranking boosts. The article was specifically about PageRank's influence on the web, in terms of link brokering and link spam. Before Google released PageRank scores, some of this happened. It would have happened even if scores had never been released, because it was well-known that Google leveraged links and thus, links had value. But PageRank scores were an accelerant. They allowed people to use Google's own scores to assign value to pages, value that could be translated into monetary value. It really did reshape the link economy, to the degree that we had a court case with a First Amendment ruling on Google's search results (amazing, when you think about it) as well as an entire new standard to restrict the credit links could pass, nofollow. I doubt Google anticipated this. Showing the scores, as the article explains, was meant as an incentive for Google Toolbar users -- "Hey, enable this feature, and we'll show you how valuable a page is deemed to be." Google's gain, of course, was that anyone enabling this sent their browsing patterns back to Google, so it better understood what was happening on the web outside of its own properties. The unintended consequence was that PageRanks scores fueled an explosion in link buying and selling, as well as link spam. Also, I didn't say the web was better before Google. It had plenty of problems, though it wasn't "pretty much un-navigable pre-Google," as you say. Many people used many of the search engines that were bigger than Google successfully for years. If it were really that bad, by the time Google came along, people would have given up on the web. Google, of course, was a huge improvement in search and for the web as a whole. The article wasn't that Google was bad for the web. It really was just focusing on one aspect that didn't help the web, how releasing PageRank scores ironically fueled some of the spam Google has to fight (and which it fights well) as well as the spam third-parties have to deal with.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > I doubt Google anticipated this. It's nice of you to say, but Google has many very smart people who spend all their time thinking about search. I would be surprised if they failed to anticipate this outcome. Maybe they thought it was worth the cost, especially as a company that values openness.

hughw 11y ago

> Never mind that web rings were around long before Google and used the same tactics. If you "never used the web before Google," how would you know this? I suppose you might have read about it. I did use the web before Google, and I don't remember web rings back then. There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages based on the links. I do remember lots of BS meta keywords.

haberman 11y ago
I used the web before Google too, and I remember them. Also, I do consider reading about something to be a valid way to learn about things you didn't directly witness, so it's strange that you would discount this. > There simply was no reason to do so, before Google started ranking pages based on the links. Webrings were useful for people who found a website interesting and wanted to visit other similar websites. The incentive to be in a webring was that you could get more exposure. Not to mention that the 90s were full of trendy things like this: "under construction" gifs, "valid HTML" buttons, etc. Web rings were one of those "clever" things you could add to a website.
- james-skemp 11y ago
  Having had pages in Webrings way back when, it was definitely about exposure, but I think it was also an extension of groups (Yahoo! Groups being the biggest I can recall, but I think there was also OneGroup (?) - it maybe had purple in it's logo?). With Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire, and the like it was fairly easy to get a really basic page up, typically with a bunch of links to pages that you checked on regularly, and might be of interest to others. At least that's how it was for me. I think the rings I was part of included Terragen, POV-Ray, and Star Wars, and I can recall getting a couple people started with basic (and of course very ugly, with that same star field background for the SW-related pages) for people that I met in the various groups. Good times. EDIT: And don't forget the 'made with notepad' icons. Or recommending 800x600 or 1024x768 as the best resolution to view a site.
- hughw 11y ago
  Fair enough guys. Thanks for reminding me about webrings. I had forgotten them and confused them with common link spam we see now. I do consider first hand memories a more reliable contribution than hearsay (reading about it), but there is some contribution in repeating received wisdom too.
kolinko 11y ago
Web rings were all the rage in 1990s/early 2000s, right before Google launched. Unless they were some other kinds of web rings we're talking about.
Jtsummers 11y ago
Web rings enabled access to related content. Definitely a pre-Google thing, I recall them from my introduction to the Web in high school circa 1996-1998 (not certain when I first saw it, but in that range).

sullivandanny 11y ago

So as the author, I'll try to clarify. The article isn't about Google's influence on the web, as a whole. Google has had a huge influence on the web in many ways, from making it easier for people to locate information to sites considering how to speed up their content, to become mobile-friendly or to use secure connections, because Google rewards such things with ranking boosts. The article was specifically about PageRank's influence on the web, in terms of link brokering and link spam. Before Google released PageRank scores, some of this happened. It would have happened even if scores had never been released, because it was well-known that Google leveraged links and thus, links had value. But PageRank scores were an accelerant. They allowed people to use Google's own scores to assign value to pages, value that could be translated into monetary value. It really did reshape the link economy, to the degree that we had a court case with a First Amendment ruling on Google's search results (amazing, when you think about it) as well as an entire new standard to restrict the credit links could pass, nofollow. I doubt Google anticipated this. Showing the scores, as the article explains, was meant as an incentive for Google Toolbar users -- "Hey, enable this feature, and we'll show you how valuable a page is deemed to be." Google's gain, of course, was that anyone enabling this sent their browsing patterns back to Google, so it better understood what was happening on the web outside of its own properties. The unintended consequence was that PageRanks scores fueled an explosion in link buying and selling, as well as link spam. Also, I didn't say the web was better before Google. It had plenty of problems, though it wasn't "pretty much un-navigable pre-Google," as you say. Many people used many of the search engines that were bigger than Google successfully for years. If it were really that bad, by the time Google came along, people would have given up on the web. Google, of course, was a huge improvement in search and for the web as a whole. The article wasn't that Google was bad for the web. It really was just focusing on one aspect that didn't help the web, how releasing PageRank scores ironically fueled some of the spam Google has to fight (and which it fights well) as well as the spam third-parties have to deal with.

hackuser 11y ago
> I doubt Google anticipated this. It's nice of you to say, but Google has many very smart people who spend all their time thinking about search. I would be surprised if they failed to anticipate this outcome. Maybe they thought it was worth the cost, especially as a company that values openness.