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Re: [LUG] EU ruling on Google

 

On 15/05/14 11:28, Philip Hudson wrote:
>
> No; in relative terms, they did no work at all to create their search
> engine. The effort involved is virtually zero compared to the returns,
> which, I reiterate, are all a (relatively, in context) negligible
> transformation of, or rather a trivial function taking as its only
> input, other people's work. PageRank is smart, it's good, it's fast,
> it scales, it's better than anyone else's... and it's vanishingly
> cheap to develop and maintain, in context.

Repeat after me "PageRank is dead". "PageRank" is still a factor in
Google Search, but it is likely unrecognisable from the original
algorithm, and plenty of other factors apply. It is probably winning
through if you search for "Click here" or other neutral terms, but it is
not the be all and end all of how Google ranks results. The web index
spammers (SEO) have put an end to that, similarly keywords are ignored,
and word density is no longer a big factor. Google do a lot of work to
maintain the quality of their search results.

Note search itself has zero returns for Google, the returns are all from
advertising, which is a whole separate system that Google developed and
maintains, and merely piggy backs on top of search. The only financial
reason to maintain search is to keep eyeballs.

Try the "Bing" challenge (5 searches in Google, 5 in Bing, compare
results blinded), and you'll see how far behind Microsoft are on search.
If it were simple, trivial, etc, Microsoft would be close behind.

It is not 1998.


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