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Google Looks at People As it Pledges To Fight Fake News and 'Offensive' Content (betanews.com)
Google said today it is taking its first attempt to combat the circulation of "fake news" on its search engine. The company is offering new tools that will allow users to report misleading or offensive content, and it also pledged to improve results generated by its algorithm. From a report: While the algorithm tweaks should impact on general search results, the reporting tools have been designed for Google's Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets which have been problematic in recent months. Updated algorithms should help to ensure more authoritative pages receive greater prominence, while low-quality content is demoted. Vice president of engineering at Google Search, Ben Gomes, admits that people have been trying to "game" the system -- working against the spirit of the purpose of algorithms -- to push poor-quality content and fake news higher up search results. He says that the problem now is the "spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information."
While I guess you have a point that Pagerank was designed to deliver better results, so were all other "search engines" of the time. Pagerank was just a better algorithm than others. But by your definition all search engines back then were "answer engines," since they all were trying to rank results somehow.
The thing is: back then Google's algorithms were still based on terms actually found in the searched pages. Hence, it was still a search engine. The ranking may have been tweaked, but you were still searching for actual text and actual search terms.
Somewhere around 2005 or so, it became possible for Google to serve up top hits that no longer contained the literal search terms. At that point it ceased to be a "pure" search engine and became about trying to guess what you wanted rather than just retrieving pages with your text. As the years went by, Google deprecated and screwed up the plus operator, increasingly screwed up verbatim search until it became nonfunctional for people who just want a literal search, and incorporated "personalization" to serve up pages more like other pages you've viewed, rather than what you literally asked for.
Google hasn't been a functional search engine in about a decade.