a) PageRank is just one of several hundred factors used for determining ranking. Search engine ranking is a lot more complicated than even most information retrieval-programmers tend to think.
b) There may have been a window of a few weeks or months in 99/00 where not every major search engine used some form of link-based ranking, but it was, as noted, a very brief period.
It always amazes me that people for almost 15 years now have believed in the myth of PageRank's uniqueness and power. I would like to challenge people to think about two things:
- how useful do you think a pure static ranking of web tens of billions of web pages is? Think about what it represents. What does it mean to assign one page higher rank than another?
- do you really believe that other search engines would not have implemented PageRank or something similar? Do you really think that search engine designers do not read papers and apply every trick in the book that they can manage to implement in a scalable manner?
There are lots of hard problems you need to solve if you want to build a web scale search engine. If ranking becomes your biggest problem: that would be a luxury. The biggest hurdle today is money to buy computing power and storage. The time when you could build a competitive web scale search engine for regular startup-money is over. It has been over for close to a decade.
It saddened me greatly when Yahoo threw in the towel because it meant that search in the western world was effectively a two-horse race. And once you get off that horse there is no getting back on it again without some seriously heavy lifting.
It's not really a static ranking, though, is it? The PageRank is constantly recalculated when incoming links change.
I don't know what other search engines have implemented because none of them will let me see their code :-) I do believe if they could implement a link-based ranking system without fear of being sued by Stanford they would. I don't know how different a link-based ranking system would have to be from PageRank to avoid getting sued by Stanford, or whether Stanford litigates this when they suspect unlicensed use. I'm guessing they do sue to defend the patent, because Google's royalties for using the algorithm number in the hundreds of millions, a significant amount towards Stanford's endowment.
a) PageRank is just one of several hundred factors used for determining ranking. Search engine ranking is a lot more complicated than even most information retrieval-programmers tend to think.
b) There may have been a window of a few weeks or months in 99/00 where not every major search engine used some form of link-based ranking, but it was, as noted, a very brief period.
It always amazes me that people for almost 15 years now have believed in the myth of PageRank's uniqueness and power. I would like to challenge people to think about two things:
- how useful do you think a pure static ranking of web tens of billions of web pages is? Think about what it represents. What does it mean to assign one page higher rank than another?
- do you really believe that other search engines would not have implemented PageRank or something similar? Do you really think that search engine designers do not read papers and apply every trick in the book that they can manage to implement in a scalable manner?
There are lots of hard problems you need to solve if you want to build a web scale search engine. If ranking becomes your biggest problem: that would be a luxury. The biggest hurdle today is money to buy computing power and storage. The time when you could build a competitive web scale search engine for regular startup-money is over. It has been over for close to a decade.
It saddened me greatly when Yahoo threw in the towel because it meant that search in the western world was effectively a two-horse race. And once you get off that horse there is no getting back on it again without some seriously heavy lifting.