

Ask HN:  How will the world change when the PageRank patent expires? - amichail

Most Web 2.0 sites including HN would benefit from PageRank or a variant thereof for example.<p>How do you think the world will change?
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neilk
Google itself has largely abandoned PageRank as described in the original
paper. It's only one of the signals used to rank web pages.

I don't understand your assertion that Web 2.0 sites would benefit from
PageRank. And in any case, the patent is not what was holding them back.

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qeorge
So they say. It may be "only one of the signals", but its the biggest by a
long shot.

Don't believe what Google tells you about its algo, test it yourself.
Remember, its in their best interests for everyone to think their algorithm is
so complex that it can't be spammed or replicated. Neither is true.

~~~
onreact-com
No, by now domain age and authority are most probably the single most
important ranking factors of Google, among 200+ other so called "signals". I
can see it in my SEO work. No domain age and authority means you can't rank in
results even with substantial PageRank.

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vannevar
Not much, PageRank was never the brilliant innovation it was made out to be.
It was a nice improvement ca 1998 but Google has spent most of the last ten
years throwing patches at the problem of people gaming the system. They've
been the Red Queen, running faster and faster to stay in place. In terms of
actually finding what you're looking for, I don't think Google today is much
better than it was then, which is maybe twice as good as Alta Vista 1998.
Search engine scalability has come a long way, but search engine results have
improved little.

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qeorge
Every major search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, ~Ask) uses a form of
"PageRank" for their rankings. That is to say, all major search engines use
the a graph as their primary ranking metric (other than relevancy, obviously).

I don't know how the patent plays in, but its fair to say "the cat is out of
the bag" that a weighted link graph is (currently) the best way to
algorithmically determine a given website's authority.

Disclaimer: I don't work for a search engine, but I am an SEO.

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vaksel
most likely it won't change a bit

~~~
rs
Agreed. Having PageRank in your product is one thing, but using it well and
scaling it up (like Google has done) is a way different (and probably much
more difficult) matter.

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jacquesm
tens if not hundreds of companies are using it right now, but because they're
not selling a product based on it there is no infringement.

You have to prove that, as long as you can't take apart some machine to prove
infringement it is just another fishing expedition.

And even if you did, I'm not sure if that would constitute infringement (since
you are not selling an apparatus containing the infringing item). Maybe one of
the legal eagles here can fill that one in ?

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wmf
IANAL, but using a patent is grounds for infringement. Unlike the GPL, patent
law has no SaaS loophole.

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evgen
True, but how would you prove it? A service just gives you the results, it
does not tell you how it comes up with the results. Someone looking for
infringement would need access to a similar base dataset and would have to run
a lot of queries to develop enough proof to get any potential lawsuit off the
ground. The only path I could see for such a lawsuit to develop would be one
where a disgruntled employee provides enough evidence to get things rolling.

~~~
alain94040
1\. You sue.

2\. You go through discovery, comb every line of code of the person you are
accusing, until you find what you are looking for

It's really that simple. All it costs is money (for both sides unfortunately).

~~~
jacquesm
no, it's not that simple, that is a fishing expedition.

No judge would allow that during discovery.

~~~
fatdog789
Quite simple: a plaintiff is not required to have complete proof of the
defendant's wrongful acts prior to suing them in court. The burden would be
too high, and most aggrieved plaintiffs would be unable to recover the harm
caused them by the defendant.

Plaintiffs have the right to get "discovery" to prove their claims _because
the defendant is usually the only person/company with evidence of the
defendant's wrongful acts_.

A fishing expedition is where the plaintiff cannot articulate any particular
type of evidence sought, or how such evidence would be useful/necessary to its
case, or how such evidence would result in evidence it could actually use.

Example: P sues D for patent infringement, demands in discovery D's head
researcher's notes. Not fishing. Example 2: Same, except that P demands the
CEO's call logs. Fishing, b/c not reasonably related to the patent
infringement claim. Example 3: Same as Ex 2, except that P alleges that the
CEO knew about the patent b/c he spoke with a former employee of P before
launching D's infringing product. NOT fishing, b/c now it's shown to be
relevant.

How to tell the difference: If you can't articulate something relevant to your
claims that the discovery _could_ reveal, it's a fishing expedition.

~~~
jacquesm
If you have absolutely no proof but only a suspicion: 'your honour, their
search results are so good, they must be infringing on pagerank' then it
really isn't going to fly. You have to have more than just a suspicion before
you can go in to discovery.

Knowing about a patent (because it has been published) is not enough.

Google could sue every other search engine right this second for infringement
of pagerank and the judge would (upon a motion by the defendants lawyers) toss
them right out without any kind of substantiation.

A declaration of a disgruntled employee, leaked source, a statement by a
prominent member of the board of the competitor, all those would be grounds to
let the trial proceed, but _nothing_ would get you tossed out.

The operative word in your argument is 'complete'.

You will not get to read your opponents code on a hunch.

~~~
alain94040
Sorry Jacques, you are wrong on that point. Been there, done that. Fishing
expeditions are very easy to hide when it relates to highly technical patents.

No point in quoting what the law says, that's all theory. In practice, it
happens.

Google _could_ sue all the search engines out there. But there is no
_business_ reason for them to. But if it ever became critically important to
them to kill a given competitor, patent infringment of the fishing kind would
be high on their list of options.

I am not a lawyer but I play one on the Founder Institute :-)

~~~
jacquesm
Ok, I believe you!

Now excuse me while I go sue the pants of some competitors in the hope of
finding some infringement during discovery ;)

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brk
PageRank is only interesting to people who do not understand it.

~~~
amichail
Could you elaborate?

Do you disagree that using it in social news sites would result in an
improvement?

~~~
brk
Yes, I disagree, but let's approach this from a different angle.

What do YOU think is so unique and valuable about pagerank and its
applicability to social news sites?

From where I sit, it's just an algorithm to spit out a relative 1-10 ranking
of a given pages authority.

~~~
amichail
You can use it to compute the importance of submissions and users in a way
that is less susceptible to manipulation.

Submissions by more important users would themselves be more important before
anyone else votes on them.

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andrewljohnson
According to Matt Cutts, PageRank is the main way Google orders pages for
crawling. If you have high page rank, you get crawled first.

mat didn't say this, but beyond that, I think the reaction of users is by far
the biggest determinant in which pages get top ranked.

~~~
onreact-com
That's true but you can make Google crawl your site even without PageRank.
Think XML sitemaps and blog pings.

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andrewljohnson
I don't think PageRank is what set Google apart. It was multi-word tokens.

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Anon84
huh... there will be one more expired patent?

Even at this point (30 or 40 years) from that day, PR is, practically, only of
academic interest.

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throw_away
patents now expire in 20 years, so <http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6285999>
expires in 2018. agreed, however, that the world will be so vastly different
by then that this won't be as significant as, say, the rsa or lzw expirations
(unless google's lawyers get their teeth into anything).

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ilkhd2
Very lightly. more small vendors will start selling inmplementations...

