Google and PageRank
This article is about how Google had made the PageRank scores of pages no longer accessible to the public. This is due to the inherent problems that arose as Google implemented a PageRank meter to their toolbar released in 2000. The public believed that PageRank values played a large role in ranking the webpages, causing there to be a link-selling economy where people would intentionally buy links in order to improve their PageRank scores. This phenomenon essentially disrupted “the democratic nature of the web.” As the article introduced this argument, I was intrigued at how the topic of morality, ethics, economy, and politics comes into play in this problem. The web has developed into a domain that is no longer just based on technological factors, but also social factors that affect the economy and other ethical issues.
I think that this interdisciplinary nature of the web parallels the INFO 2040 Networks course, as the course incorporates many different disciplines like psychology, economics, computer science, and sociology to explain the concept of networks and how this concept is so ingrained into our lives.
Because this article keeps mentioning how Google has different factors to determine which web pages are prioritized over the others, I am curious to know what other factors are taken into consideration to determine this. It is interesting to think that the web is a super-network of a complex map of nodes and edges that could represent different web pages and links.
RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web