Nothing happens. Similar ranking systems are already in use and there's much more to a modern search engine anyway. It's just a small quirk of this very particular approach no longer being fully protected.

Nothing. Everybody freely has copied PageRank already. It has became one of the basic teaching material in graph theory.

For example, NetworkX, a popular graph library in Python, implements PageRank. [1]

[1] https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...

How does that work in the real world - do google simply not care, or it's "fair use" somehow?

The patent is only for web search, so other applications dont infringe the patent.

First sentence of the abstract of the patent:

"A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database."

They'd only care if money gained - PR lost == profit.

Years back, graph dbs bragged about implementing PR in a few lines and ecologists using PR on species.

https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-algorithms/current/algorithms/p...

https://phys.org/news/2009-09-web-page-algorithm-critical-sp...

We already have Open Pagerank based on the Common Crawl.

Maybe Stanford University no longer gets any license fees from Google for this patent. not sure

Hopefully everyone deprecates everything similar and we return to content based search, where pinterest and there rest freeze in the depth of hell.

> return to content based search

It'll need to be a pretty sophisticated version of "content based search", or it'll just be overwhelmed by keyword stuffing and garbage auto-generated content.