A former Google engineer named Jonathan Tang (LinkedIn profile) who worked at Google on search between 2009 and 2014 said Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006. He said this in a Hacker News thread yesterday.
He said "The comments here that PageRank is Google's secret sauce also aren't really true - Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006. The ones about the search & clickthrough data being important are closer, but I suspect that if you made those public you still wouldn't have an effective Google competitor."
But didn't Gary Illyes from Google just say recently that Google does use PageRank even today?
DYK that after 18 years we're still using PageRank (and 100s of other signals) in ranking?
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) February 9, 2017
Wanna know how it works?https://t.co/CfOlxGauGF pic.twitter.com/3YJeNbXLml
The answer seems to be that PageRank has changed. Jonathan Tang added later that it was changed or upgraded:
They replaced it in 2006 with an algorithm that gives approximately-similar results but is significantly faster to compute. The replacement algorithm is the number that's been reported in the toolbar, and what Google claims as PageRank (it even has a similar name, and so Google's claim isn't technically incorrect). Both algorithms are O(N log N) but the replacement has a much smaller constant on the log N factor, because it does away with the need to iterate until the algorithm converges. That's fairly important as the web grew from ~1-10M pages to 150B+.
Here is how John Mueller of Google responded to this:
Just a random side-note, but as SEOs you know that it's unlikely that Google engineers haven't made changes in Search in the past 20 years.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 16, 2019
We switched to cane sugar link juice.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 16, 2019
So Google is using something like PageRank, but not the exact original PageRank algorithm. I think we kind of knew that?
Forum discussion at Hacker News.
