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Comment by websitejanitor | Hacker News Reader

>The comments here that PageRank is Google's secret sauce also aren't really true - Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006.

That's quite a claim considering they were reporting PageRank in their toolbar until 2016, and toolbar PageRank was visible in Google Directory until 2011.

Are you talking about PageRank from the original patent?

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It is a seemingly incorrect claim. Google has semi-recently, publicly said they still use PageRank as one of their signals.

https://searchengineland.com/google-has-confirmed-they-are-r...

https://twitter.com/methode/status/829755916895535104

They replaced it in 2006 with an algorithm that gives approximately-similar results but is significantly faster to compute. The replacement algorithm is the number that's been reported in the toolbar, and what Google claims as PageRank (it even has a similar name, and so Google's claim isn't technically incorrect). Both algorithms are O(N log N) but the replacement has a much smaller constant on the log N factor, because it does away with the need to iterate until the algorithm converges. That's fairly important as the web grew from ~1-10M pages to 150B+.

> That's fairly important as the web grew from ~1-10M pages to 150B+.

This is the weird thing -- it feels smaller. Back in the early 2000s it really felt like I was navigating an ocean of knowledge. But these days it just feels like a couple of lakes.

(also, I'm pretty sure it was billions already quite early on?)

So what's the name of the new algorithm?

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