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It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself.

It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. There are so many possible viable methods for ranking search results! Particularly now with higher level textual analysis using AI/ML/[buzzword], and perhaps more importantly, the resurgence of interest in curated content. People are getting better at discerning curated-for-revenue vs. curated-with-love.

the_other 6y ago
> It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results were best when PageRank was the dominant metric. As they moved more and more in the direction of prioritising news, commerce and the aspects we call SEO, “number of links pointing TO the resource” became less and less important in the ranking. And as that happened, the quality of results dropped, and the content silo-ing rose up. PageRank was peer-review. SEO is “who shouts the loudest”.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and that's what motivated a lot of changes to the ranking system.
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    Nofollow helps a fair bit but requires cooperation from all high ranking sites to ensure that they don’t leak their PageRank juice.
- hedora 6y ago
  They had to abandon page rank because it was widely gamed. As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s. The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry. That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Before Google/pagerank took over, sites were successfully gaming the rankings of search engines like Altavista by adding every keyword they could think of in the html header, or hidden in the page with an invisible font etc. It got to the point Altavista became more or less useless, and when Google showed up on the market they quickly took it over. Seems the time is ripe for a new revolution. Doesn't have to be a better search engine, could be something completely different.

the_other 6y ago

> It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results were best when PageRank was the dominant metric. As they moved more and more in the direction of prioritising news, commerce and the aspects we call SEO, “number of links pointing TO the resource” became less and less important in the ranking. And as that happened, the quality of results dropped, and the content silo-ing rose up. PageRank was peer-review. SEO is “who shouts the loudest”.

Jtsummers 6y ago
SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and that's what motivated a lot of changes to the ranking system.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  Nofollow helps a fair bit but requires cooperation from all high ranking sites to ensure that they don’t leak their PageRank juice.
hedora 6y ago
They had to abandon page rank because it was widely gamed. As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s. The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry. That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.
- jabl 6y ago
  Before Google/pagerank took over, sites were successfully gaming the rankings of search engines like Altavista by adding every keyword they could think of in the html header, or hidden in the page with an invisible font etc. It got to the point Altavista became more or less useless, and when Google showed up on the market they quickly took it over. Seems the time is ripe for a new revolution. Doesn't have to be a better search engine, could be something completely different.