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Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

patents.google.com

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Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#41

Post by Nextgrid »

jjoonathan wrote: post #39
tyingq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.

A different, more profitable kind of spam dominates now.

A kind of spam from which Google profits because it often embeds its ads and/or analytics.

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#43

Post by shockeychap »

blip54321 wrote: post #37
creamynebula wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...

Indeed. It's an arms race. Search engines versus SEO.

Wholeheartedly agree, but with an important caveat - Google is no longer fighting for the best interest of it's users, it's fighting for the best interests of it's advertisers. How useful the results are is now secondary to "how much can this search be monetized". The former was important in the early days when Google needed to be competitive on search.

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#44

Post by DeathArrow »

dontbenebby wrote: post #16
5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the results are worse and worse.

To be fair, they don't seem to teach the next generation about search operators. I've found just using quotes, OR/AND, and some other basic stuff can often get me what I need. The place where Google does well is that they're a monopoly, so things like image search that require a lot of resources, they are better at, especially paired with their geographic location. (USA! USA! USA!) Edit: I hit enter and the post went…

When was the last time search operators actually mattered on Google?

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#45

Post by marginalia_nu »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #24

Google search has gotten so bad compared to how it used to be that this might actually be useful.

PageRank performs fairly poorly on the web as a whole these days, because the nature of linking has changed since 1998. If you constrain it to the parts of the web that is still basically hypertext documents, it's as good as ever.

That's largely what I've been doing with my search engine.

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#46

Post by geysersam »

dylan604 wrote: post #29

They should have copyrighted it. They could have received new protections each time it was tweaked. If it's good for the Big E Mouse Corp, it should be good for the DontBeEvil types as well. Protection in perpetuity.

Great idea. I wonder how that would have played out in court. Any lawyers around?

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#47

Post by chrisseaton »

creamynebula wrote: post #32
tyingq wrote: post #5

I'm not sure how useful this might be to anyone anymore. Google still uses it for the base ranking. But, the results are then run through a variety of add-on ML pipelines, like Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality), and many others that target other attributes (page layout, ad placement, etc). Then there's also more granular weightings for things like "power within a n…

My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...

I don't understand how you're comparing the two.

You think the results were better in 2006, but the corpus was also different.

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#48

Post by atty »

swiftDaemon wrote: post #21
failTide wrote: post #4

Revolutionary at the time - but have there have been any new breakthrough strategies/algorithms for search in the last decade?

yes https://youtu.be/6HYdTtIoyts

Proof of work to rank pages? That sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard. I’m no fan of Google injecting ads into the top spots of their results but at least you can get to the “real” results by just scrolling down. With this paradigm, every link becomes paid “ad”, and the ranking is completely dominated by companies and individuals with big pockets, not any objective or even subjective measure of the quality. And they’re all ads paid for by wasting energy.

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#49

Post by [deleted] »

heretogetout wrote: post #20
dontbenebby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they don't seem to teach the next generation about search operators. I've found just using quotes, OR/AND, and some other basic stuff can often get me what I need. The place where Google does well is that they're a monopoly, so things like image search that require a lot of resources, they are better at, especially paired with their geographic location. (USA! USA! USA!) Edit: I hit enter and the post went…

Quotes aren't what they once were. They don't guarantee that the term you quoted will be in the results.

[deleted]

Re: Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

#50

Post by PaulHoule »

shockeychap wrote: post #43
blip54321 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It's an arms race. Search engines versus SEO.

Wholeheartedly agree, but with an important caveat - Google is no longer fighting for the best interest of it's users, it's fighting for the best interests of it's advertisers. How useful the results are is now secondary to "how much can this search be monetized". The former was important in the early days when Google needed to be competitive on search.

Most directly, if the search results were perfect you would never need to click on an ad.

The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name so that they appear above the organic #1 search result. It's like the time Facebook decided it wouldn't send messages to followers who like you unless you paid up.

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