PageRank was of paramount importance back then. At the time, AltaVista/Inktomi were easy to spam, and Google wasn't.
The google spam that actually works (or at least, worked a few years ago, before panda) requires setting up lots of sites, lots of independent IP blocks. That was much harder when PageRank appeared - hosting was damn expensive, VPSes were nowhere to be found.
PageRank was a huge thing. I used "and" queries in altavista at the time. It was no match.
Comments
I think Google's high quality search results were less due to PageRank than the fact they AND'd search terms instead of OR'ing them.
PageRank was of paramount importance back then. At the time, AltaVista/Inktomi were easy to spam, and Google wasn't.
The google spam that actually works (or at least, worked a few years ago, before panda) requires setting up lots of sites, lots of independent IP blocks. That was much harder when PageRank appeared - hosting was damn expensive, VPSes were nowhere to be found.
PageRank was a huge thing. I used "and" queries in altavista at the time. It was no match.