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Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. Tha
by tinus_hn 4y ago
Pagerank (TM) was a Google innovation and the reason Google had much better results than the others and it took many years for the SEO spammers to catch up. That revolution, combined with the philosophy of the speedy, focused homepage and the elimination of irrelevant results by always using the ‘AND’ operator was why their popularity exploded.
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoAt Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Despite this objective comparison, in users' view Google's results were much much better. I remember a German CS professor telling me eyes in eyes with obviously a lot of schadenfreud "Google will kill you". And I answered "No they will become as us, big, fat and ugly".
- dragonwriter 4y ago> At Voila, a subsidiary of France Telecom, a study around 2005 found that their search engine offered nearly the same answers as Google, while not in exactly the same order. Order is a pretty big part of tbe value prop of a search engine, so ”nearly the same” results but “not in exactly the same order” is not as much similarity as you seem to be implying.
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoCome on, there's no absolute correctness for a result in being in Google's first versus second answer. The actual order depends a lot on the user's context. Even Google doesn't change the order of answers based on the user's context. Otherwise it wouldn't say in Google Web Console "your site appears in nth position"
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Come on, there’s no absolute correctness for a result in being in Google’s first versus second answer. “Absolute correctness” is an irrelevant standard. Order can affect satisfaction without "absolute correctness" being a thing that can even be assessed meaningfully. > Even Google doesn’t change the order of answers based on the user’s context. Yes, it does. [0] > Otherwise it wouldn’t say in Google Web Console “your site appears in nth position” I think that reflects the experience of a no-context user (e.g., not logged in or otherwise tied to a history to provide context.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_searching#Automatically_inferred_context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_searching#Automatic...
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoAll a Google killer has to do is resurrect Altavista's near operator which is what ChatGPT is doing in an abstracted way.
- dekhn 4y agoOther people invented pagerank and used it for pageranking before Google. It's just a centrality metric.
- tinus_hn 4y agoActually Google got a patent for the concept of Pagerank, number US9165040B1.
- dekhn 4y agoYou mean stanford. Getting a patent in no way means you were first.
- tinus_hn 4y agoGoogle is the initial assignee and a patent provides exclusionary rights to the inventor of a technology. Great if someone else thought of it earlier but no one published anything using it or thought to get a patent, because otherwise this very important patent would have been void and it wasn’t.
- dekhn 4y agoRobin Li's rankdex patent predates pagerank, see https://patents.google.com/patent/US5920859A/en?oq=US5920859A https://patents.google.com/patent/US5920859A/en?oq=US5920859... as well as the pagerank patent, which cites it.
- tinus_hn 4y agoPatent US9165040B1 does not cite US5920859A, I’m not sure what you mean.
- jeffbee 4y agoJeff Dean even posted on G+ about how he essentially independently invented a variant of pagerank at DEC, but his supposed collaborator couldn't figure out how to open a tar archive, and that was the proximate cause of his leaving DEC.