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No, that's not what I said. PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. PR is, very basically, a network ana

No, that's not what I said. PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. PR is, very basically, a network analysis algorithm. A simple way of thinking about it is the random walk analogy: Imagine randomly browsing pages on the web by clicking on links, what's the probability of you landing on the page in question? The higher the chance of you randomly finding the page the higher its PR. But again, this is a very very simplistic view and the actual algorithm is of course very very secret. The idea isn't though, and you can read the original paper by Brin and Page at http://cli.gs/qVDNYm http://cli.gs/qVDNYm .

palish 18y ago
PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated.
- pierrefar 18y ago
  I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated. Well it needs to be a general algo that works with all types of content, all fields of knowledge, work around all known types of spam, in all languages, while working on HTML quality. Complicated? No, necessary.
  - palish 18y ago
    That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. That's what I'm referring to! Hehe. I feel insane. Am I really failing at communicating? Let me try again: If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess!
    - ntoshev 18y ago
      Actual ranking at the time of your search does not involve too much computation, because a lot has been precomputed and stored in those Google indexes. In theory, you can view every search as a function of your query and all the web documents out there. This function is partially evaluated for a fixed universe of documents and super optimized. Evaluating hundreds of parameters is common sense for machine learning tasks. If you look at the papers explaining how the top Netflix prize competitors achieve their score, this is again what they do: they run literally hundreds of algorithms over the dataset and then blend the results. And this is for a domain where their data is only (user, movie, rating, date) quadriplets.
      - palish 18y ago
        Yeah... But just because a design is also a scientific paper doesn't make it overcomplicated.
        ntoshev 18y ago
        Don't get your point... Mine was that the solutions to machine learning problems are inherently messy (at least this is the state of the art).
        palish 18y ago
        Typo, sorry. I meant, just because a design is a scientific paper, that doesn't make it a good or simple one.
    - Mystalic 18y ago
      Google keeps it very clean, and they tune the algo every week. But again, it's necessary because relevancy to a human being is continent on THOUSANDS of factors, and they try to incorporate as much of that in as simple of an algorithm as possible.
    - anamax 18y ago
      > If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess! "overcomplicated mess" seems to imply "it's a bad solution". While Google's ranking system may be "bad" (they believe that it isn't good enough), "bad" or even "overcomplicated" doesn't follow from "hundreds of influences". Consider the "design" of a common house cat. Its design is the result of thousands of influences. It may be difficult for people to think about systems with hundreds of influences, but that's a people problem and doesn't imply that such systems are inferior to more understandable systems.
- Tichy 18y ago
  I wouldn't surprised if it is thousands or even millions of influences, many of which might be generated automatically. Part of it might just work like a spam filter, for example, so even single words could be factored into the algorithm. Just guessing, but there could be a rule like "if site contains the string '$$$' reduce rank by 0.5%" and so on - all automatically generated, just as it would happen in a spam filter. Also take a look at SpamAssassin, I have heard it let's you manually combine configure and weigth all sorts of algorithms. At the end of the day, most of Google's employees concerned with improving the search results are probably doing just that most of the time. Even if some Google researcher comes up with a new algo tomorrow, it will probably just be factored in, it won't simply replace the previous algorithms.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
mcdowall 18y ago
I remember reading this a few years ago. We had an SEO firm perform some site analysis for a previous site and have just taken onboard the main principles and tried to replicate them. I think thats a good assumption reading up on it in more detail, the relevance of the rank itself is a very small factor in the performance of the site and its keywords etc. I think we may have some relevant high worth links coming in that i wasnt previously aware of, our own link building campaign rarely acheived more than a PR5 or PR4 site so I will look into the backward links.

palish 18y ago

PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated.

pierrefar 18y ago
I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated. Well it needs to be a general algo that works with all types of content, all fields of knowledge, work around all known types of spam, in all languages, while working on HTML quality. Complicated? No, necessary.
- palish 18y ago
  That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. That's what I'm referring to! Hehe. I feel insane. Am I really failing at communicating? Let me try again: If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess!
  - ntoshev 18y ago
    Actual ranking at the time of your search does not involve too much computation, because a lot has been precomputed and stored in those Google indexes. In theory, you can view every search as a function of your query and all the web documents out there. This function is partially evaluated for a fixed universe of documents and super optimized. Evaluating hundreds of parameters is common sense for machine learning tasks. If you look at the papers explaining how the top Netflix prize competitors achieve their score, this is again what they do: they run literally hundreds of algorithms over the dataset and then blend the results. And this is for a domain where their data is only (user, movie, rating, date) quadriplets.
    - palish 18y ago
      Yeah... But just because a design is also a scientific paper doesn't make it overcomplicated.
      - ntoshev 18y ago
        Don't get your point... Mine was that the solutions to machine learning problems are inherently messy (at least this is the state of the art).
        palish 18y ago
        Typo, sorry. I meant, just because a design is a scientific paper, that doesn't make it a good or simple one.
  - Mystalic 18y ago
    Google keeps it very clean, and they tune the algo every week. But again, it's necessary because relevancy to a human being is continent on THOUSANDS of factors, and they try to incorporate as much of that in as simple of an algorithm as possible.
  - anamax 18y ago
    > If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess! "overcomplicated mess" seems to imply "it's a bad solution". While Google's ranking system may be "bad" (they believe that it isn't good enough), "bad" or even "overcomplicated" doesn't follow from "hundreds of influences". Consider the "design" of a common house cat. Its design is the result of thousands of influences. It may be difficult for people to think about systems with hundreds of influences, but that's a people problem and doesn't imply that such systems are inferior to more understandable systems.
Tichy 18y ago
I wouldn't surprised if it is thousands or even millions of influences, many of which might be generated automatically. Part of it might just work like a spam filter, for example, so even single words could be factored into the algorithm. Just guessing, but there could be a rule like "if site contains the string '$$$' reduce rank by 0.5%" and so on - all automatically generated, just as it would happen in a spam filter. Also take a look at SpamAssassin, I have heard it let's you manually combine configure and weigth all sorts of algorithms. At the end of the day, most of Google's employees concerned with improving the search results are probably doing just that most of the time. Even if some Google researcher comes up with a new algo tomorrow, it will probably just be factored in, it won't simply replace the previous algorithms.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

mcdowall 18y ago

I remember reading this a few years ago. We had an SEO firm perform some site analysis for a previous site and have just taken onboard the main principles and tried to replicate them. I think thats a good assumption reading up on it in more detail, the relevance of the rank itself is a very small factor in the performance of the site and its keywords etc. I think we may have some relevant high worth links coming in that i wasnt previously aware of, our own link building campaign rarely acheived more than a PR5 or PR4 site so I will look into the backward links.