Beyond PageRank: How Google Has Evolved
Link to Article: https://www.fastcompany.com/90241011/this-man-has-helped-shape-google-search-almost-from-the-start
Since 1999, Google has revolutionized the way our world conducts a simple or complex query search on the web. Its game-changing PageRank algorithm helped pave the way to tailoring more accurate, reputable, and more popular web pages to users in order to provide a more informative and valuable search experience. However, in the article titled This Man Has Helped Shape Google Search Almost From the Start, author Harry McCracken explains how one individual — Ben Gomes — not only transformed PageRank into a useful search engine algorithm, but also helped Google become an even bigger search engine powerhouse by building algorithms that tailored search beyond PageRank. We thought PageRank was cool enough; but Google has surpassed even its own algorithm’s robustness through a variety of innovative techniques.
First, McCracken goes on to explain how one of Ben Gomes’s early responsibilities at Google was to figure out how to make the PageRank algorithm scale. In other words, it’s great that the algorithm could work on 25 million web pages already. But could it go even further? Fortunately, although Gomes explained how machines at the time were not all too powerful, the PageRank algorithm proved scalable. And in a cyberspace where trillions of web pages exist under Google’s nose, this was a crucial accomplishment to ensure that one of Google’s most iconic businesses — search — could grow and link many pages to each other effectively. However, Gomes’s job did not end there. In fact, over the last two decades, Google has customized its search algorithms even more, going way beyond PageRank to yield good results to users. For instance, Gnomes explains how Google has actually included over 2400 improvements to search in the last year alone, but most of them are extremely subtle. Some of these improvements include Activity Cards, which show pages you visited previously if you repeat a search, the Discover feature, which predicts information that you might like before you search for it, and even an AI-driven feature that predicts natural disasters depending on your location. But what I found to be most interesting was the Google actually made even bigger improvements with its search queries throughout its growth as a company. In fact, at one point Google could not handle misspelled queries (i.e. they would only show web pages that had those misspellings as opposed to the actual word). This certainly affected PageRank and motivated the company to fix this issue algorithmically. And now, as voice search becomes more popular, Google is tailoring search results more in the form of a question. Clearly, the search engine giant has already made massive improvements beyond PageRank to provide accurate search engine results to users.
I loved reading this article because it connected so well with the conceptual topics we have covered thus far in Networks, specifically PageRank. The PageRank connection is quite clear because Google is the main entity responsible for devising and utilizing PageRank to optimize search. However, I really liked how this article went even beyond PageRank and explained how many of Google’s search engine results have now been generated with the help of more tools than just PageRank. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and even better query search algorithms have bolstered Google’s search accuracy and have only improved its overall search algorithms. Ultimately, while the PageRank algorithm may still be at the heart of Google’s search engine technology, it is important to realize that the company has advanced its search engine optimization beyond just this one algorithm. It just shows how networks are so dynamic (in this case, web page networks) and that there are even more improvements to come in the field of search.