> Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech.
How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines.
> It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking
Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.
How is this not implicitly the case with "only organic" search results? PageRank was built off of the idea that a website's value was based off of inbound links. Back in the day, high school kids could get $50/hour (in 1990s dollars) to build and upload a simple webpage for a local business. Money has always been a factor in influence, before and after search engines.
> It's not about the information itself being pure, it's about purity of ranking
Again, this purity is an illusion -- the things that can be objectively ranked are things in which the metric is simple, i.e. alphabetical order. Stray from that and rankings are no longer "pure" by any stretch of the imagination. Not even early PageRank -- the many easy ways to game it, and the many ways that PageRank has evolved to avoid such gaming, should make that assertion self-evident.