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The inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. Remember, before the PageRank algorithm, people thought

The inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. Remember, before the PageRank algorithm, people thought Internet search was a dead end. The leading search providers were continuing to push pure boolean queries; an approach that was quickly becoming unsustainable under the mass of spam that was starting to exploit text-relevance metrics. Google's use of link-based popularity metrics was truly revolutionary, in that it wasn't apparent by simply extrapolating existing trends in Internet search engines.

Volt 15y ago
>The inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. I think it can. Around the time that PageRank was published, Jon Kleinberg also published the HITS (hubs & authorities) algorithm. There are some key differences in the way they work, and Page & Brin smartly went on to found Google around PageRank, but it was becoming evident in that period that hyperlink-based ranking was a smart thing to do.