Gadgetopia

PageRank is Dead: Is it actually dead? I don’t know, but he makes a good point here:

“Google has a really hard problem to solve. It’s not unlike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying to ‘understand’ the web caused the web itself to change.”

The hitch behind Google and other engines is that the methods they use have to remain secret for them to be effective. The second someone deciphers the algorithm, it becomes useless. PageRank was a very neat thing, but since everyone knows how it works now, it’s becoming less and less effective. And PageRank was the one thing that made Google stand out.

Google has become such a default, that there was bound to be some backlash sometime. The opinion Jeremy states, along with the GoogleNACK, the AdSense PR mess and the apparently arbitrary approvals for the service, have really knocked Google down a notch or two.

Maybe it’s time to switch the default search engine in my copy of Firebird. I hear AllTheWeb is very good, and it claims to have a larger index than Google.