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Google's PageRank patent has expired (2019)

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

#91

Post by jjoonathan »

mynameisash wrote: post #74
ge96 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.

This was my experience last year when I wanted to find a locksmith. EVERY result on GMaps that was shown as being in my city was, in fact, some centralized company that seemed to contract out to guys working out of their cars. Every one took my name and said they'd get back to me (which they did). This is certainly a problem with the locksmith companies, but I think there's also a Maps problem, too: Google enables th…

Does Google get paid more if they link you directly or if they link you to the middleman?

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Backrub paper

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

#92

Post by photochemsyn »

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.

I find using the 'verbatim' option under tools is usually necessary to get the exact phrase. However if I also try to use an exact date range (uploaded in past five years, say), then the verbatim option is automatically disabled. Can't do both at the same time, it's really annoying.

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

#93

Post by foobarian »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #78

Google won because they started early and had the right algorithm. Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting backlinks instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This made Google way better than any other available search engine back then (Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.), and within weeks, everyone was switching to G…

> way better than what’s currently available

Hand-curated walled garden sub-web that bans SEO spam with an iron hand.

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

#94

Post by srean »

samhw wrote: post #86
srean wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could pose this as an adversarial game. For the simplistic case consider two participants -- (i) the ranker that chooses a ranking scheme (we need to constrain the space of ranking schemes somehow for this to lead to any useful formulation), (ii) web page who tries to outrank other pages by strategically linking to other pages, and possibly buying links to itself from other pages. One can give (ii) a budget to ad…

> If you check my original comment I gave a simple scheme to attack HITS rank. Sybil attack is a little harder for Pagerank. OK, but how is it harder for PageRank? I can't really see any differences in the semantics of the two algorithms, so I'm not sure what kind of added vulnerability one or the other could have. > One could pose this as an adversarial game. Yeah, I appreciate that, that's what I was referring to a…

> OK, but how is it harder for PageRank?

If you are familiar with the algorithms, which I assume you are, you can work it out.

To make my page score high on the PageRank score I need to acquire links from high PageRank score pages. This is a lot harder because it depends on a) in-links and b) high PageRank pages. With Hits, its easy for one page to harvest a high Hub score. All that is needed is to outlink to known good pages (authority). Providing outlinks is trivial. Once so harvested, one can direct that flow to a designated page to give it a high Authority score.

> It's not really the kind of 'game' that would be considered in game theory

Why not ? Formalize the strategy spaces of both the players and its a very valid game in the Game Theory sense. For the ranker you have to consider some functional space of functions over a graph. For the page player it has a budget of alterations it can make to the graph.

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

#95

Post by ricardo81 »

tyingq wrote: post #90
ricardo81 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>smaller Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.

What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites. They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things li…

For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say.

What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.

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

#96

Post by peoplefromibiza »

losvedir wrote: post #51
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...

> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines... That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have to use their walker and glasses all the time...

> That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006

It's simply a fact that in 2006 Google search results were better.

Reasons might vary and could well not be Google's fault, but it's not old man yelling at clouds it's provably true.

Of course people that were not using Google before 2006 can't really know, just like people that are not old cannot experience how much better being young is, body functioning wise.

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

#97

Post by aeyes »

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…

Try Yandex image search, you'll be surprised how good it is.

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

#98

Post by criddell »

raunak wrote: post #75
losvedir wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines... That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have to use their walker and glasses all the time...

Search is objectively worse today than it used to be, it's not just that "it's harder to use for old people", it's just worse.

It would be cool if we had a snapshot of the web from the time you think it was better and could pit the algorithm of today against the algorithm that was contemporary with the snapshot. It would also be interesting to take the old algorithm and apply it to the web of today.

My bet would be that each algorithm would perform best on the web of its day.

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

#99

Post by BarryMilo »

zdragnar wrote: post #77
s17n wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the web was better in 2006. I think Google has made one change for the worse, though, which is strongly favoring more recent content. Increasingly, I think that change has been a big contributor to the decay of the web since.

Part of the problem is, I think, many searches strongly benefit from up to date content- programming tools, fashion, celebrities, things to do in X area, etc. It seems that Google has decided that most people want the most updated information when they look for something, which I don't think is entirely unreasonable. What I would love , however, is a way to turn that off for particular searches. Researching past even…

You mention options in passing, but it is to me the root of the problem: Google hates giving up control. Control means ad revenue. So we could have options that would make search extremely efficient for most users, but that would presumably be very hard to monetize in comparison. So we have no options, and everyone gets mediocre to bad results.

Since everyone I know in tech laments Google's decline into uselessness, I'm assuming this is not a sustainable strategy.

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

#100

Post by iamcurious »

988747 wrote: post #11
TuringNYC wrote: post #6

Can anyone explain why the PageRank patent was valuable when an alternative (Prof Jon Kleinberg's Hypertext Induced Topic Search or HITS algo) was published at the same time and available for use? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

From your linked Wikipedia page: "it is executed at query time, not at indexing time, with the associated hit on performance that accompanies query-time processing" - for a search engine that planned to take over the Web that might have been a dealbreaker.

Seems like an obvious optimization though. Is that enough to grant a patent?
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