Blog Post 2 – Google Removing PageRank From Google Toolbar
Perhaps the largest web-search engine company in the world has made a major announcement regarding their browsing toolbar only a few months ago. Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has announced that their longstanding toolbar feature PageRank will no longer be visible to the public. As shown by the first image, the Google Toolbar which is enabled in Internet Explorer no longer has a ranking for a particular webpage.
However, there is more to learn about this removal. Google has only removed the visibility of the PageRank to the public, meaning that Google still holds all of the PageRank information privately in its system, and will continue to calculate the rank. Additionally, as confirmed by a Google spokesperson, the PageRank function will also continue to be used in the algorithms that Google currently has for prioritizing web searches. The spokesperson went on to say that this change does not affect webmasters as well, as they still have the ability to use their Search Console to understand their content’s presence in relation to Google searches. He closed by saying that the Internet’s growing complexity of statistics has made PageRank data relatively obsolete for both webmasters and users globally.
As effective as this system has been for Google in the past, its flaws will surely not be missed. One major flaw for webmasters was that their data was losing legacy PageRank when they switch their browser from http to https, for more web security. Additionally, sellers have been using this metric for selling links at a specific margin when in hindsight this method was not the most effective for quantifying their market. Lastly, there are webmaster support systems that are still advising their clients to utilize PageRank as a means of interpreting their content’s online presence, when Google has already introduced far superior analytics years ago.
Personally, I have never used the PageRank System nor would have known it if I ever saw it, but it does appear to be one of the building blocks that allowed Google to rise to its stardom. This algorithm, while simple enough for college students to compute on a lower scale, was one of the first looks into web-browsing analytics in its time, and was able to aid prominent companies in their attempt to develop a significant online presence. Even if PageRank may be outclassed by other methods in today’s high technology era, understanding the basic algorithm behind PageRank helps us further realize the significance of online networks and how links rely on each other to increase overall online activity.