Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google research head Peter Norvig says that the search giant's hallowed PageRank link-analysis algorithm is overrated. And always has been.
"One thing that I think is still over-hyped is PageRank," Norvig said this morning during a question and answer keynote at the search-obsessed SMW West conference in Santa Clara, California. "People think we just do this computation on the web graph and order all the pages and that's it. That computation is important, but it's just one thing that we do.
"People [webmasters and SEOs] always said, 'We're stuck if we don't have [a high PageRank].' But we never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor."
When the hourly index was rolled out, Norvig remembered, Larry Page insisted on calling it the "3600 second" index.
Now, its distributed infrastructure - using proprietary technologies like the Google File System and MapReduce - [Google] can update its index in "10 seconds," according to Norvig.
