Google's search results have become pretty much useless for anything but like... how to videos and song lyrics. I know there are better alternatives out there in the year of our lord 2022, but I've been using Google since before it was a verb. Any suggestions?
Also, how difficult is it to build an open source search engine? I imagine it's not something that a group of hexbear coders could manage, but if I'm wrong... we could really use a search engine with an explicitly leftwing bias.
PageRank just counts how much a website is linked to by other websites with good PageRank. It makes a ton of sense in the old internet where links were manually curated. It'd find everyone in your web ring, notice that all of you are also linking to the same Sailor Moon fansite, and rank that site highly because it's clearly well-respected in whatever niche this is.
It's easy to game this by just making a bunch of trivial websites that all link to a few of each other plus the site you actually want to boost.
Obviously you then try to exclude things that look like fake web rings, but now you're in an arms race with the SEO goblins.