They had to abandon page rank because it was widely gamed.
As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s.
The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry.
That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.
Before Google/pagerank took over, sites were successfully gaming the rankings of search engines like Altavista by adding every keyword they could think of in the html header, or hidden in the page with an invisible font etc.
It got to the point Altavista became more or less useless, and when Google showed up on the market they quickly took it over.
Seems the time is ripe for a new revolution. Doesn't have to be a better search engine, could be something completely different.
As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s.
The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry.
That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.