> 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 devel

> 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.)