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Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than Twitter could ever hope to. At worst, Twitter's just exposed the worst qualities of people to a broade

Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than Twitter could ever hope to. At worst, Twitter's just exposed the worst qualities of people to a broader audience.

mperham 5y ago
I have no idea what you are talking about. I remember web search before Google existed. PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search results. Literally night and day. There’s a reason why Google is a verb now.
- onion2k 5y ago
  PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search results. The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so much better than the competition that it gave Google an effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to return better results than the competition. Consequently now Google search is only OK at returning what you're after, and the page is 50% ads. Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is still better than the competitors but that's only because there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really only Search that drives revenue. I strongly believe that if anyone made a better search engine than Google, and consequently Google's ad money took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are building the search product they're rumored to be building all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs will be safe.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Apple could even go default no tracking, because iDevice owners would willingly hook into opt-in tracking if there were app support. Giving everyone else a "free" ride would be a no-brainer.
  - leobg 5y ago
    Peter Thiel’s argument precisely.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea that has a few VERY wrong assumptions built into it. (As does web search in general.) Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites that linked to a site was the best measure when all links were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' unless the author of the site liked your site and was convinced it wasn't full of crap). More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years after the Web started and not 7.
- OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
  Twitter has no impact on how websites are designed. I'm not sure anyone has optimized their website for Twitter engagement. No one is selling their services as a Twitter Rank Optimizer. There aren't thousands of websites on how to get better Twitter ranking results. No one has sued Twitter over linking to their site with a small blurb. It's a comparative statement in response to 'twitter is killing the web'. Twitter has no impact over the web. Public discourse, yes absolutely. But it isn't impacting the web in the same way PageRank (or Google Search more generally) has changed how the web is made.
pjc50 5y ago
Compared to having a web search that returns only spam?
- Philadelphia 5y ago
  Thought you were talking about Google now for a minute. It’s close to 100% spam, fakey rankings, and the world’s cheapest SEO content for almost any search.
vosper 5y ago
Did it? Before Google people were just using other search engines, there was always some intermediary deciding what links to show you first. There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there isn't competition, but that's not how it started :)
- pjc50 5y ago
  Altavisa! Lycos! But even before that, when there were no search engines, there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/ https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings, and putting your URL into print to get people to type it in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    Astalavista was the darker Altavisa alternative..
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Remember when Yahoo was a directory (how I learned the word 'hierarchical'!) and there were people who maintained sites listing things like new Geocities sites? I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans want human context in information searching. Those of us who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard case.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Machine searching could have been good enough, but search is an adversarial problem in a way that libraries aren't.
    - vkou 5y ago
      > Most humans want human context in information searching. No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons of their libraries only interact with them during the check-out process.
rektide 5y ago
> Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than Twitter could ever hope to. If you're going to show up in someone's thread, tell them they're missing the picture, g make a big bold counter claim... for heavens sake have the reasonability to make a refuttable claim. Make sometbing i can disagree with. Make some assertion. I dont have the faintest clue why you'd make this assertion. The web is free to innovate. What about page rank is a threat to the open web? In my view good interesting stuff is able to grow & succeed adequately. Maybe im not in a popular camp here, but, not everything on the web needs gangbusters mass critical success. I feel like there's a lot of high interest, active communities & products that arise & grow via word of mouth jiut fine. I dont see search engines as relevant. I feel like the social processes of the world are far far far more powerful & informative governors, that products & services make themselves. This idea that search is that important doesnt ring at all true to me in the world today. You're getting people who dont know much or have much idea getting connected to low-denominator highly-massified results. This is basically a promise that search will almost never lead to interesting ends. Real, useful, interesting connectivity comes from elsewhere. Good things get started via opt-in interests, not random discovery. I'd really apprwciate it if you'd at least explain your position at least a little. Just throwing down an opinion without explanation makes discussion or explanation nearly impossible. It's really low grade discussion. I've tried to elaborate some how i think this discussion might go, but you havemt made any real claim other than that you think someone is to blame, not why.

Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than Twitter could ever hope to. At worst, Twitter's just exposed the worst qualities of people to a broader audience.

mperham 5y ago

I have no idea what you are talking about. I remember web search before Google existed. PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search results. Literally night and day. There’s a reason why Google is a verb now.

onion2k 5y ago
PageRank was a massive, huge improvement in search results. The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so much better than the competition that it gave Google an effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to return better results than the competition. Consequently now Google search is only OK at returning what you're after, and the page is 50% ads. Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is still better than the competitors but that's only because there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really only Search that drives revenue. I strongly believe that if anyone made a better search engine than Google, and consequently Google's ad money took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are building the search product they're rumored to be building all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs will be safe.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Apple could even go default no tracking, because iDevice owners would willingly hook into opt-in tracking if there were app support. Giving everyone else a "free" ride would be a no-brainer.
- leobg 5y ago
  Peter Thiel’s argument precisely.
Mezzie 5y ago
PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea that has a few VERY wrong assumptions built into it. (As does web search in general.) Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites that linked to a site was the best measure when all links were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' unless the author of the site liked your site and was convinced it wasn't full of crap). More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years after the Web started and not 7.
OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
Twitter has no impact on how websites are designed. I'm not sure anyone has optimized their website for Twitter engagement. No one is selling their services as a Twitter Rank Optimizer. There aren't thousands of websites on how to get better Twitter ranking results. No one has sued Twitter over linking to their site with a small blurb. It's a comparative statement in response to 'twitter is killing the web'. Twitter has no impact over the web. Public discourse, yes absolutely. But it isn't impacting the web in the same way PageRank (or Google Search more generally) has changed how the web is made.

pjc50 5y ago

Compared to having a web search that returns only spam?

Philadelphia 5y ago
Thought you were talking about Google now for a minute. It’s close to 100% spam, fakey rankings, and the world’s cheapest SEO content for almost any search.

vosper 5y ago

Did it? Before Google people were just using other search engines, there was always some intermediary deciding what links to show you first. There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there isn't competition, but that's not how it started :)

pjc50 5y ago
Altavisa! Lycos! But even before that, when there were no search engines, there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/ https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings, and putting your URL into print to get people to type it in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner.
- iszomer 5y ago
  Astalavista was the darker Altavisa alternative..
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Remember when Yahoo was a directory (how I learned the word 'hierarchical'!) and there were people who maintained sites listing things like new Geocities sites? I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans want human context in information searching. Those of us who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard case.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Machine searching could have been good enough, but search is an adversarial problem in a way that libraries aren't.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > Most humans want human context in information searching. No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons of their libraries only interact with them during the check-out process.

rektide 5y ago

> Google PageRank has done more damage to the open web than Twitter could ever hope to. If you're going to show up in someone's thread, tell them they're missing the picture, g make a big bold counter claim... for heavens sake have the reasonability to make a refuttable claim. Make sometbing i can disagree with. Make some assertion. I dont have the faintest clue why you'd make this assertion. The web is free to innovate. What about page rank is a threat to the open web? In my view good interesting stuff is able to grow & succeed adequately. Maybe im not in a popular camp here, but, not everything on the web needs gangbusters mass critical success. I feel like there's a lot of high interest, active communities & products that arise & grow via word of mouth jiut fine. I dont see search engines as relevant. I feel like the social processes of the world are far far far more powerful & informative governors, that products & services make themselves. This idea that search is that important doesnt ring at all true to me in the world today. You're getting people who dont know much or have much idea getting connected to low-denominator highly-massified results. This is basically a promise that search will almost never lead to interesting ends. Real, useful, interesting connectivity comes from elsewhere. Good things get started via opt-in interests, not random discovery. I'd really apprwciate it if you'd at least explain your position at least a little. Just throwing down an opinion without explanation makes discussion or explanation nearly impossible. It's really low grade discussion. I've tried to elaborate some how i think this discussion might go, but you havemt made any real claim other than that you think someone is to blame, not why.