While reading “Demystifying Networks Part 1 of n: An Introduction,” I noticed that Scott Weingart mentioned Google’s PageRank as an example for a directed edge. I followed along with what he said when explaining that directed edges were relationships in which “…you cannot switch out Node1 for Node2.” Weingart uses authors and books in his demonstration showing that the connection between the first node (an author) and the second node (the book) is that the author writes the book. It would be silly to say that the book writes the author so these terms cannot be switched. How does with relate to Google?
Google’s PageRank uses an algorithm that ranks sites based on how many visits and links there are to the site. In Manipulability of PageRank under Sybil Strategies, Alice Cheng and Eric Friedman use a term, sybil, which can be described as when “a single user creates several fake users […] who are able to link to (or perform false transactions with) each other and the original user” allowing the websites that the real user wants to gain popularity to do so. One of the girls that works at the psychiatrist’s office that I intern in told me that at a previous job she worked in, the company had about four laptops solely for that purpose of increasing the number of times their website was visited.
So the first pages that appear when you search for something on Google are the ones that are most visited and linked to, right? Not exactly. Above is a screenshot I took when entering “Beverly Hills Psychiatrist” and these are the results I got. What I was searching for when I typed in “Beverly Hills Psychiatrist” was actually the website for the psychiatrist I intern for, “drsolution.net”, which appeared right below the results shown above and only appeared on the map when zoomed in. Notice that all seven of the results in the screenshot are partnered with Google leading me to believe that the largest determinant in the algorithm is money. I decided to check how these websites rank globally on “alexa.com”, which ranks all of the websites in the world based on how many visits they get. From the seven results in the screenshot, only two have websites separate from Google so I searched them both on Alexa and compared the results to “drsolution.net” and found that “bowmanmedicalgroup.com” ranked higher than Dr. Solution did but “www.beverlyhillspsychiatry.net” was so low that it did not even have a rank leading me to confirm my suspicions that money is a huge factor in who shows up first in the listings.
Works Cited
http://www.cs.duke.edu/nicl/netecon06/papers/ne06-sybil.pdf
http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=6279