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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me. If spam links count for negative value you get competitors doing negative seo by buying cheap bad links to competing websites in bulk via places like fiverr. If they count for zero value then you get webmasters trying their luck by buying the same stuff themselves - who knows, there could be a good link amongst all the bad stuff and no harm in trying...

Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

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"The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me."

Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed!

Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have.

The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs and the user base changes significantly.

Designing things that are secure and un-gameable while still usable is actually very difficult.

It looks like it was devised without security in mind. This is something we are starting to learn not to do.

In that sense, TCP, the routing protocols, DNS &c were all designed that way (without malicious users in mind).

Which for some time was very good and then BANG!

I guess software engineering has to start dealing with this issue in a scientific way as well. And so academics will start thinking 'correctly', if this is possible.

Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank.

How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.

And over two years ago, Google began a major attempt to reinvent themselves. I hear it's called "Plus".

are you suggesting that facebook could seize the search jewel from google? It is a genuine question.

No, I was more attempting to hint at a possible use for G+.

Pagerank has been far from the sole ranking criteria for a long time

> Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

There's mounting evidence that this is the direction Google is going in.

This would have been disasterous earlier in Google's life, but at this point they're so dominant that they can basically force everyone else to deal with their screw-ups.

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