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"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. But the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want".

Quote: Sergey Brin / Larry Page, from the seminal 1998 paper that kickstarted the #PageRank algorithm - and #Google with it (see Appendix A).

Reading the paper that started it all after so many years is a quite interesting experience. 25 years ago they knew *exactly* what a search engine may have become if it chose the path of an ads-based business model. They were very aware of the conflict of interest that arises when you have to provide relevant results to the users, but also boost those that pay your bills.

In other words, were warning us about the risks of the business model that their own company eventually decided to embrace.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf