Question

What if the concept of PageRank/Domain ratings (whatever you call it) was never invented? Then how would have older Search Engines ranked the pages (without the help of natural language, AI/ML)? Is there any Search engine which is ranking pages without considering the factor of Domain/page level ratings?  

Answer 1

The old Teoma algorithm was a superb algo.  

Comments

@hadik28 what was the factor to judge best page?  

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Have a quick read here.  

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Was just reading this

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Doesn't this sound like something similar to EAT buzz nowadays

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There are very few 'new' things with regards to SEO and search algorithms. Have a look at two algorithms. 1. H. I. T. S. 2. Hilltop Have a good read of those and understand them, it will make life so much easier.  

Answer 2

Bing. com

Comments

@egalitarian882 you sure they don't use domain level ratings?  

Answer 3

"Is there any Search engine which is ranking pages without considering the factor of Domain level ratings? " Baidu, Bing, Google, and Yandex. They all use page-level metrics, not domain-level metrics.  

Comments

@narcotize yeah that's what I was trying to say. Corrected in OG post.  

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Historically the major search engines of the 1990s used Inktomi to power their results. There was no consumer-facing Inktomi engine. One of Inktomi's criteria was "link popularity" (raw link counts, not a weighted flow of value like PageRank). And then sometime around 2007, 2008 a couple of Googlers broke away to launch Cuil. It didn't use a link-weighting algorithm. I was about the only person in the SEO industry who actually liked Cuil's interface AND its search results. I thought it was pretty good. And there have been a variety of meta search engines that collected feeds from multiple crawling search engines and used algorithms to blend their results. But those algorithms - good as they were - have been retired because there are fewer available crawling search engines to work with. Now most search engines are powered by Bing.  

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@narcotize Thanks! That's some great info. I will dig deeper in Cuil (Cools) algorithm.  

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@inflationism Cuil doesn't exist any more. They ran out of money and one of the founders went back to Google.  

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Another important search engine of the 1990s was Digital Equipment Corporation's Altavista. They spun it off as a separate company, if I recall correctly. Altavista had its own algorithm. It was heavily influenced by on-page text (including comments in the HTML) and had some sort of link factor, too. Yahoo bought Inktomi and eventually acquired Altavista. The Yahoo search algorithm that came out of those two services competed well with Google and Microsoft for almost a decade. Then Microsoft concluded a disastrous (for consumers) deal where Yahoo shut down its search engine and just used Bing's results. I tried to stop it with a Clayton Act complaint I filed with the government. They only delayed the deal by a few months before eventually caving in to Microsoft's demands. Web search hasn't been the same ever since.  

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There were also some hybrid search engines that combined user=edited directory listings with crawling and internal algorithms. NBCi (launched by the NBC television network) was rebranded as Snap. It was a very good search engine (in my opinion) but NBC/Universal had no idea of what to do with it so they just shut it down.