I agree that you don't need NLP to rank webpages (though it certainly helps), but you do need it to parse the kinds of queries given to search engines these days. The days of logical OR and NOT are long gone I'm afraid.
> It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.
I think other commenters have addressed the PageRank issue, but I'd be super interested in papers doing the work you note above.
I agree that you don't need NLP to rank webpages (though it certainly helps), but you do need it to parse the kinds of queries given to search engines these days. The days of logical OR and NOT are long gone I'm afraid.
> It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.
I think other commenters have addressed the PageRank issue, but I'd be super interested in papers doing the work you note above.