Page Rank in the Modern World
Learning about PageRank in this class was especially interesting to me, because search engine results have always seemed magical. When I make a Google search of “networks,” I get about 1 billion results in 0.98 seconds. Sure, these results were previously indexed, but the entire concept of immediately getting 1 billion potential answers to whatever you’re querying is just mind-blowing.
I read “Why You Rank On Google But Not On Bing And Yahoo (And How to Fix It).” From the title, it seems like the article is catered toward those looking to improve their own relevance in search results, but in doing so, it also makes a lot of interesting observations about how search engines work and how different search engines differ from one another.
I’d imagine that factoring backlinks into page ranking is very similar to what we covered in class – but interestingly enough, if we consider a hub/authority relationship, Bing seems to place more value on hubs that make fewer connections to highly valued authorities. This is an interesting idea that seems to place value on hubs that know what they’re talking about, but aren’t stuffed with links to other resources. And indeed, in most websites that one might go to for trustworthy opinions, there isn’t an absurd amount of linking to other authorities.
One particularly interesting thing the article noted was that Bing takes social media involvement into account. If a Facebook friend engaged with or recommends some search result that is relevant to your query, the result will be elevated in ranking. Though I don’t use Bing, this idea is particularly intriguing and I think that it could make the search engine feel more personal. Whether that’s a good thing is to be decided by the individual.
Relevant article: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/rank-google-not-bing-yahoo-fix.html