The emphasis should be on the 'was' there. PageRank was so much better than the competition that it gave Google an effective monopoly on search. That lack of competition meant Google could focus on how to get users to click on ads displayed alongside search results rather than how to return better results than the competition. Consequently now Google search is only OK at returning what you're after, and the page is 50% ads.

Google hasn't been coasting along on the success of search for decades though thankfully. A lot of Google tech is very, very good (Gmail, Docs, YouTube, GCE, etc). Search is still better than the competitors but that's only because there's only really Bing. The problem is that it's really only Search that drives revenue.

I strongly believe that if anyone made a better search engine than Google, and consequently Google's ad money took a nosedive, Google would be faced with an existential crisis unlike any other business in history. If Apple are building the search product they're rumored to be building all Google staff should be very worried because no jobs will be safe.

Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites that linked to a site was the best measure when all links were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' unless the author of the site liked your site and was convinced it wasn't full of crap).

More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years after the Web started and not 7.

It's a comparative statement in response to 'twitter is killing the web'. Twitter has no impact over the web. Public discourse, yes absolutely. But it isn't impacting the web in the same way PageRank (or Google Search more generally) has changed how the web is made.

There was lots of competition, and it turned out Google was way better at being relevant than everyone else. Now there isn't competition, but that's not how it started :)

But even before that, when there were no search engines, there were directories (https://dmoz-odp.org/) which tried to take a taxonomic approach to the whole web, webrings, and putting your URL into print to get people to type it in. The latter culminated in an early version of the QR code: regular barcodes and the "cuecat" barcode scanner.

I think a lot of the modern Web's problems can be traced to the desire to cut out human intermediaries in the early Web, mostly to focus on speed and monetization. (No curators in the models means no need to PAY curators). I also think the rise of the influencer and parasocial relationships are trying to fill the void. Most humans want human context in information searching. Those of us who don't need it are the weird ones, not the standard case.

No, they don't. Ask any librarian about how many patrons of their libraries only interact with them during the check-out process.

I'd argue that things like our cataloguing process counts as 'human context', as do things like our hold and check-out systems, library space arrangement, etc. Even if a patron doesn't interact with a staff member in person, there is a difference between a library and, say, Kindle Unlimited from a UX standpoint.

Human context and human curation doesn't necessary mean human contact.

Archives are similar: There's a ton of work giving things context and making things discoverable even if a researcher never talks to the archivist who's done these things.

If you're going to show up in someone's thread, tell them they're missing the picture, g make a big bold counter claim... for heavens sake have the reasonability to make a refuttable claim. Make sometbing i can disagree with. Make some assertion.

I dont have the faintest clue why you'd make this assertion. The web is free to innovate. What about page rank is a threat to the open web? In my view good interesting stuff is able to grow & succeed adequately.

Maybe im not in a popular camp here, but, not everything on the web needs gangbusters mass critical success. I feel like there's a lot of high interest, active communities & products that arise & grow via word of mouth jiut fine.

I dont see search engines as relevant. I feel like the social processes of the world are far far far more powerful & informative governors, that products & services make themselves. This idea that search is that important doesnt ring at all true to me in the world today. You're getting people who dont know much or have much idea getting connected to low-denominator highly-massified results. This is basically a promise that search will almost never lead to interesting ends. Real, useful, interesting connectivity comes from elsewhere. Good things get started via opt-in interests, not random discovery.

I'd really apprwciate it if you'd at least explain your position at least a little. Just throwing down an opinion without explanation makes discussion or explanation nearly impossible. It's really low grade discussion. I've tried to elaborate some how i think this discussion might go, but you havemt made any real claim other than that you think someone is to blame, not why.

but twitter murdering in the cradle alternative interfaces, ideas, tools... them de-democratizing democracy... that was deeply deeply deeply traitorous. it really held back the ability of people to participate as they might in democracy, to advance their own perch & perspective in the fray. it keeps us trapped at a low mode, forever and ever. as well as sabotaging the general age of hopefulness & apis we were underway exploring. one huge fuck up for twitter, a mass epic radical loss for human & societal values in general. fuck us.

I'm disgusted by your unsolicited insinuation. What you said, for me, it's similar to someone saying that Navalny might be a criminal because you know many people and don't recall any of them being arrested. It's ignorant and patronizing at the same time.

In this post-truth era it's not uncommon for someone to be falsely accused and persecuted. It's not uncommon for someone to be cancelled just for not agreeing with the mass. In my experience, if hate speech and pseudo science were to be truly banned Twitter would cease to exist.

Also, if you follow ~1400 people how can you be sure that many of those weren't banned or shadow banned?