

The Science of Crawl: Improving on PageRank - jisaacso
http://blog.urx.com/urx-blog/2015/3/31/the-science-of-crawl-part-3-prioritization

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discardorama
Relying on PageRank (or the graph structure of the pages) alone is no longer
enough. Now you need to follow users and see who's clicking on what, and what
trails are being blazed across the web. This is where Facebook's "Like button"
comes in, or Google Analytics (or AdSense). Google can follow people around
and see what's hot _right now_ , and surface those links. WikiPedia may be a
great hub, but if people are making a beeline for a Brad Pitt article on TMZ,
then that Brad Pitt article may be more relevant right now than his Wikipedia
page.

TL;DR: Search is hard. Google and others have taken ranking to levels _far_
higher than PageRank, which is nearly 20 years old now.

~~~
solve
PageRank as a secret sauce that solves search -- this was actually always an
overblown myth created in the early days of Google for PR purposes. It fits
their PR mission perfectly because they want everyone to think that super
smart algorithms are the secret to their success.

If PageRank was really as useful as they say, Google would have had tons of
high-quality competitors from day 1.

~~~
pc2g4d
Except for patents:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Relevant_patents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Relevant_patents)

~~~
solve
Except search engines have sole control over the systems doing the
calculations. It's easy to see how they could just go ahead and use the
patented methods on their private servers, and no one on the outside would be
able to legally prove that they copied their patented method, at least for a
long time.

Just some patents would never have kept competitors from moving in on this
200B market.

