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Isn't this how Google (as search) got off? Altavista et al got spammed into unusable mess and their use collapsed almost overnight when PageRank (temporarily a

Isn't this how Google (as search) got off? Altavista et al got spammed into unusable mess and their use collapsed almost overnight when PageRank (temporarily as we've learned) managed to filter out the spam. Of course nowadays Google's tentacles are so deeply everywhere that they will churn on with subpar technology just like e.g. Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft etc etc. The oligopoly is probably here to stay.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
It's so easy to try out another search engine, and people do all the time. It's also easy to set any search engine as the default, unless you use iOS. It's also super easy to use different search engines in parallel. I often search HN for a different perspective and for live search. Sometimes also github. And of course amazon, whenever I want to order something.
KMag 3y ago
> PageRank (temporarily as we've learned) managed to filter out the spam. It was more temporary (shorter time period) than you probably realize. I was a developer on the Google web indexing system. PageRank was only one of many signals that went into ranking, and PageRank was gamed by link farms pretty early. There's a whole team dedicated to fighting webspam, and their spam signals are some of the other inputs to the scorer. By Google's golden years, there was a whole lot of secret sauce going into fighting webspam, and PageRank had been pretty thoroughly gamed. PageRank was important, but I think its importance is generally over-estimated. Also, about 15 years ago, Google was testing another link-graph-based metric that was more efficient to calculate and less susceptible to linkfarms. I imagine PageRank (as described in the patent/Wikipedia) has been replaced, though perhaps the new algorithm is still referred to as PageRank. (IIRC, the proposed replacement was being called PageRankNG while in testing.)

amadeuspagel 3y ago

It's so easy to try out another search engine, and people do all the time. It's also easy to set any search engine as the default, unless you use iOS. It's also super easy to use different search engines in parallel. I often search HN for a different perspective and for live search. Sometimes also github. And of course amazon, whenever I want to order something.

KMag 3y ago

> PageRank (temporarily as we've learned) managed to filter out the spam. It was more temporary (shorter time period) than you probably realize. I was a developer on the Google web indexing system. PageRank was only one of many signals that went into ranking, and PageRank was gamed by link farms pretty early. There's a whole team dedicated to fighting webspam, and their spam signals are some of the other inputs to the scorer. By Google's golden years, there was a whole lot of secret sauce going into fighting webspam, and PageRank had been pretty thoroughly gamed. PageRank was important, but I think its importance is generally over-estimated. Also, about 15 years ago, Google was testing another link-graph-based metric that was more efficient to calculate and less susceptible to linkfarms. I imagine PageRank (as described in the patent/Wikipedia) has been replaced, though perhaps the new algorithm is still referred to as PageRank. (IIRC, the proposed replacement was being called PageRankNG while in testing.)