>they're using it to find pages with similar text. This is one vision of what a search engine's job is, but I'm not sure it's what most users are looking for.

>they're using it to find pages with similar text. This is one vision of what a search engine's job is, but I'm not sure it's what most users are looking for. Even barebones pagerank goes far beyond just finding similar text - it uses structure of the web's link graph to estimate the quality of a page. Now obviously pagerank is not directly trying to ascertain which pages are truthful and which are not, but it is arguably using connectedness as a proxy - the assumption is that people tend to link to reliable, useful pages and tend not to link to incorrect, harmful ones. Does vanilla pagerank also violate your boundaries for what a search engine should do?