Page Rank and its Relevance Today
Does Google PageRank Still Matter in 2018? A Retrospective View in the PageRank History
This article delves into various different aspect of page rank, and why although people may think that it is obsolete, it is actually still a relevant device among Google’s searching algorithms. It addresses the history of page rank, why it seemed to disappear, and how it shaped the internet. In 2013, Google stopped displaying a page’s page rank on the toolbar, because of spammers trying to unethically improve their page rank, by selling page-rank boosters. However, even after the page rank was taken off of the toolbar, spammers still left a digital footprint of shady links in forums, comments, and emails. This article put into perspective how different the internet was a few years ago, and how one of the most important metrics was page rank, but now our understanding of the internet is much more complex, so we in this day and age, we would not rely on only this metric to judge a website. However, google did update their patent on page rank, and a google spokesperson did say that page rank is still being used by google, which means that although it may not be the only unit of metric to judge websites, it also is not completely obsolete.
This relates to what we did in class because recently we studied how to compute page rank. In class we learned about how different pages point towards a plethora of different pages. We also learned how a page is deemed important if several other ‘important’ pages point towards it. This article went more into depth of this concept, by explaining the cons of page rank— that people can manipulate the system. However, the article acknowledges that page rank is still a very interesting and important algorithm that has shaped the history of our internet today.