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> Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today It works as well as it ever did, i.e. in non-adversarial situations. It's not designed to be secure so it fails whe
by lisper 1mo ago
> Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today
It works as well as it ever did, i.e. in non-adversarial situations. It's not designed to be secure so it fails when people try to game it. Designing something like Page Rank that works in an adversarial environment is still an open problem.
- inigyou 1mo agoSo in other words it doesn't work.
- lisper 1mo agoUm, no? It works in non-adversarial environments. Such environments are rare in today's world but they still exist, mainly where there isn't a profit motive. Believe it or not, there are still some people in the world who believe that there is more to life than money.
- exe34 1mo ago> Believe it or not, there are still some people in the world who believe that there is more to life than money Do they use page rank?
- inigyou 1mo agoWe are talking about web search.
- lisper 1mo agoNo, we are talking about Page Rank, which is an algorithm on directed graphs. Web search is one application, but not the only one.
- MiroslavPokorny 1mo agoThe PageRank algo by definition is broken, because it equates popularity rather than truth or correctness. The perfect example of why this is broken is health and medicine, for all its fails, we all know that modern medicine is based on evidence, something all other alternatives are not. Secondly take news, the actual source the source of truth most of the time is not the first match, and could and is often surpassed by some social media commentator which is just wrong imho. PR never worked. Its the same as thinking the stars of music (pick any name) are the best because they are popular even if they cant play an instrument and most never write their own songs.
- lisper 1mo agoYou clearly don't understand how Page Rank works. It is not just a matter of counting the incoming links.
- tancop 1mo agoCorrectness is impossible to evaluate without a panel of humans to define "the truth" for each topic and an advanced NLP system that compares the meaning of a page with it. Impossible in 1996, you could maybe pull this off today with LLMs but it would be super expensive and not very reliable. This would create an intentional bias in the results. That's not something you expect from a web search, it should return the most relevant and popular links not the ones that agree with mainstream science. Wikipedia, PubMed and other databases where actual experts contribute are way better for that.