4 ms·

Google's ranking blends together hundreds of variables, just one of which is pagerank. If it is so prominent, there is a reason for this: it is effective in del

• jacquesm 18y ago
  I disagree with that to some extent. Yes, it is still effective, but it is much less effective now than it was when it was launched. Pagerank turned out to be the death knell to the value of linking to someone, it created an opportunity to be gamed so large that it changed the nature of the object (the internet) that it was supposed to be measuring. A good measuring device does not 'load' the circuit to the point that it stops to function...
  • ntoshev 18y ago
    I guess no one has come up with a better way. If you introduce a new system, it has to be at least as good as what we have now: no one would want to sacrifice relevant results. It is wrong to think about pagerank as a single algorithm: it is a family, the common things being that these algorithms analyze the global link graph (yes, I lumped the HITS algorithm in the same family). The problem is, if you don't use the link graph, there is not much left. There is the content, but this is not enough: before Google you could often steal someone's high ranking by just copying his content verbatim or maybe tweaking it a little. So, pagerank is actually a big improvement over what was out there before. Pagerank can be thought as an estimation of the traffic a website gets. Suppose you can measure the actual traffic (e.g. by forcing all sites to install google analytics). That would be a pretty well gaming-proofed system, but you would introduce so much inertia - every new site would have a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.