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by skybrian 2838 days ago
Pagerank is just one factor in a much more complicated algorithm. The full algorithm has always been secret, because SEO is a thing. If you demand a transparent algorithm, you're giving up search that actually works.

However, at a meta-level, there is some public information about how Google decides whether a change is making things better or worse. This doesn't tell you how the algorithm works, but it shows the goal they're optimizing for.

Google has "over 10,000 human raters" that rate search engine results. I don't know how they choose the raters, but presumably it's a variety of people in each country. You can read about them here:

https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-qu...

Also, the guidelines that the human raters are supposed to follow are public, and you can read them here:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...