The Online Writer’s Battle Against the Google Search Engine
PageRank, an algorithm introduced by Larry Page, is a system used by Google to rank websites in the search engine results. Google’s PageRank algorithm attempts to judge the relevancy of a page by proposing two questions: “How many links point to a particular web page, and how valuable are those links?” In practice, when comparing two similar pages, the one with the most links pointing to that page should rank higher in the search engines; However, not only does the quantity matter, but the quality as well. This means that a page with a few high-quality links could potentially rank higher than a page with multiple low-quality links, which formed a system that rewarded keyword-rich content that attracted incoming high-quality links. This occurred during a period when competition on the web among social networking sites was relatively low, yet these rules changed along with the boom of the internet in the early 2000s.
Bad marketers began to take advantage of the configuration of Google’s PageRank algorithm and discovered that to attract links and grow traffic, all they had to do was publish mediocre, keyword-rich content that was shallow and brief. Some even took it to the next level by creating additional content on other sites and linked those pieces back to their main site. This caused many good content writers to become overshadowed by bad content writers, as traffic skyrocketed, rankings soared, and a demand for content erupted. Therefore, the internet played against the stronger writers, as the page’s content took precedence over the author.
This is when the Principle of Repeated Improvement was introduced into Google’s PageRank algorithm. As discussed in class, it surrounds the idea that if pages scoring well as lists have a better sense of where the higher-quality results are, then we should weight their votes more heavily. These pages are called hubs, which receive scores equal to the sum of the votes received by all pages that it votes for, as a higher sum indicates that the page has some sense where the good content exists. The highly endorsed answers to these queries–the kinds of pages originally being sought–are called authorities. These votes can be repeatedly re-weighted back and forth to evaluate endorsements more accurately, in which each refinement to one side enables a further refinement to the other. This updating process allows web users to have more trust in the pages that are estimated to be good lists with higher-quality content, bringing more justice to the stronger writers of the internet.
Sources:
https://copyblogger.com/page-rank-vs-author-rank/
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch14.pdf