The Science of Crawl: Improving on PageRank

Following users works for popular culture and not much else. The head of Google search says "as the search engine gets smarter, the queries get dumber." It's not that useful even for product or service search - that just drives more traffic to sites that are already getting traffic. For a short period, Google tried using Google Trends to affect search ratings. That backfired badly; if someone could generate a lot of searches leading to their site for an hour, suddenly they went to the top of results. There were some very funny search results during that period.

As for URX, a company whose pitch is "Get paid to link into apps. It's not an ad, it's an action" probably isn't interested in improving search quality.

There's a big opportunity for Apple to move into search and offer a higher-quality experience for Apple customers. Apple makes their money selling to their users, not selling ads.

(Our pitch, of course, is to automatically do some due diligence on the company and use business legitimacy as an input to ranking. This works reasonably well, but for an ad-supported search engine, does not maximized profits. Adsense (ads on third party sites) is 30% of Google's revenue.)

PageRank as a secret sauce that solves search -- this was actually always an overblown myth created in the early days of Google for PR purposes. It fits their PR mission perfectly because they want everyone to think that super smart algorithms are the secret to their success.

If PageRank was really as useful as they say, Google would have had tons of high-quality competitors from day 1.