[Translation] Google's PageRank is dead

I'd like to take a moment to mourn the passing of PageRank — the key secret that made Google the search engine we all love.

Some people may be talking about how Blogs have killed PageRank. But the fact is, the entire online world undergoes profound changes every few years. And whether you believe it or not, PageRank is old. In Internet time, PageRank might already be in its middle age.

It hasn't been officially declared dead, but the time is approaching. And the signs have been there for a long while.

You see, PageRank was once a simple yet brilliant concept: using the structure of the web itself to determine what's popular and what's not. But those days are behind us. Google will no longer be able to independently decide what’s popular. Like many companies, they also care deeply about what sells and what advertisers want. There are speculations that Google may be responding to various behaviors by Blogs that pollute their search results.

There has been much discussion lately about whether Google is removing their Blogs from the index pages (or not). However, people are attacking the wrong target. Google doesn’t need to remove them. They just need to distinguish them reliably with a simple method. This way, these Blogs could be penalized (given a lower PageRank value). And whether you believe it or not, if you have a good sitemap and some initial Blogs, it isn't very difficult.

This has already happened. And the results are worse than expected. Now [sometimes] when searching for "jeremy" on Google, the results differ greatly from before. Notice that Google now believes my homepage (the author's) is much more important than my Blog (also the author's). For lack of a better term, I call this being "retarded."

(It seems only part of Google has been changed this way. If you're patient enough, you can still get the old answers from their search cluster. That's how I got those two screenshots. So far, it seems to be a 50/50 chance, at least on the West Coast.)

I never expected that my first search result wouldn't be the main focus (like it is now).

Let's be honest. My homepage is terrible. No one else links to it. Sure, there are a lot of old links, but let's look at what Google tells us. Around 600 pages link to my homepage, whereas over 1800 pages link to my Blog. Three times as many pages link to my Blog, and I guarantee they are more meaningful. They are newer. They often aren't just pointer nodes because there are annotations about me or articles I've written.

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.

Google has a truly difficult problem to solve. Unlike Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, when people start understanding how PageRank works, PageRank begins to stop working. Google's attempt to "understand" web behavior has caused changes in the web itself. Blogs are just one example at this stage. Strangely, unlike...