On this fine April 1st, Google brings us a visual representation of the accelerating decline of PageRank:

If only that image had existed a year ago. (Yes, that post is about one year old.)

On a related note, thanks to Google for making this year's April Fool's Day so damned entertaining on so many different levels. Keep up the excellent work and teasing.

Posted by jzawodn at April 01, 2004 11:00 AM

Reader Comments
# Scott Johnson said:

When I first saw that image on Google's site, your classic "PageRank is Dead" article was the first thing to cross my mind. This just seemed like a perfect illustration for you.

on April 1, 2004 11:30 AM
# Arcterex said:

Are you sure gmail is an AFJ? http://taint.org/2004/04/01/200428a.html Doesn't think so....

Cousre, I"ve been taken in twice already by friends of mine, so I'm just rarin' to be the guy that falls for it :)

on April 1, 2004 11:47 AM
# Scott Johnson said:

There are a lot of people out there who don't think Gmail is a joke. I won't believe it's true until the site is live, works, and allows me to store 1GB of mail.

on April 1, 2004 12:04 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Arcterex: who are you asking?

I said it was entertaining. Was that not clear?

on April 1, 2004 12:08 PM
# david said:

Too bad this only lasts a day..then again, i'd better take down what I did- google might index it and it'll end up in cache for life :)

on April 1, 2004 12:37 PM
# Aristotle Pagaltzis said:

I have heard mention that Google deliberately worded the press release about Gmail the way it did to make people believe it were an April Fool's, even though it isn't. A meta April Fool's joke, so to say.

on April 1, 2004 03:57 PM
# gabriel ricard said:

Hmmm... I'm getting a little tired of Google. We host a lot of real estate sites at work, and getting them to show up in any search results (since there are thousands and thousands of real estate sites out there) is a bit of a pain - on google. Every other search engine gives the sites reasonable placement in the results that's accurate to the search criteria. Google? One day a site will be on top, the next day it won't be in the results at all. There's no damn consistency there and it drives me nuts. Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, etc., all have the sites show up at least in the first page of results. Is Google going losing it?

on April 2, 2004 05:14 AM
# Michael Conlen said:

Here's the thing about GMail (if it's true)... ...who's got 1 GB of email. I think they are really saying "unlimited" but using the GB to go with the G in Google as a marketing ploy. Here's why...

I'm utterly abusing with email. I've got almost every personal email sent to me over the last five years (unfortunately I lost the previous email). I've got a TON of saved spam to use for research, tons of mailing lists that I'm months, if not a year behind on that I'll delete someday and literally a few hundred folders. It's all rather stupid when you think about it. Here's the catch, it's only 750 MB of email with well over half of that being saved spam.

Anyone who's going to have 1 GB of email will be the sort who has their own mail server. By the time the average person will have close to 1 GB it won't be such a big thing.

On the other hand, here's an opportunity to send targeted SPAM to everyone. They will know what to target you with based on the content of the message you're being sent *and* all the other messages you receive. They can spam on the way in, they can spam on the way out...

This deserves some thought.

on April 2, 2004 08:28 AM
# senthil said:

Every time some sees an entry about PageRank in your blog,is getting to feel
So, you started Again?! Oh No!

on April 2, 2004 09:20 AM
# John Palmer said:

Jeremy, it gets even worse. One site I work with, ElectionAnalysis.com was spidered by Googlebot, then indexed, and started showing up in serps. It was getting decent placement and some traffic, depending on keyword searched.

Then suddenly without warning or explanation..... it just disappeared! Completely! Not even the whole URL returned a result.

Then, suddenly..... poof! It re-appeared!

I asked around and was told that Google is screwing around with the algorithm in REAL TIME! Meaning sites are get popped in and out and up and down all over the place daily or even hourly.

Apparently they don't give a crap whether or not you and I and much of the internet depends on SE results to survive.

Long Live Yahoo! ;-)

on April 2, 2004 05:53 PM
# Seun Osewa said:

You don't seem to be interested in gmail!

On my weblog, I have an article suggesting, among oter things, that google should use jabber to propel itself into the instant messaging space.

http://www.afriguru.com/2004/google-messenger.html

What do you people feel?

on April 6, 2004 12:44 PM
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