PageRank isn't new at this point, has been publicly available for more than 10 years. If I were less of an idiot myself I'd found a fresh search engine. Other than Dear Bing (who doesn't support the "Verbatim" filter), there are no public independent full-web indexes left.
What makes you think that Search still runs mainly guided by page rank?
If that were the case then search engines would differ only on how big their database is, but unless you care about the long tail you wouldn't be able to notice much of a difference.
I don't work in ranking, but considering how the web has changed since the early 2000s I'd guess that page rank's quality has gone down as spammy websites and walled gardens appeared.
PageRank is basically worthless at this point. Its baseline assumption, that keywords and in-links correlate with relevance, is now broken. The vast majority of stuff out there is SEO'd and link-farmed to death. If you want to find anything relevant with PageRank these days, you first need to find a way to filter out all of the spam. This is why search is so hard now.
Google now has moved to model based ranking. In the current (search-hostile) web environment, PageRank or whatever simplistic algorithm doesn't work anymore.
i've got my issues with brave but iirc they're actually doing an independent web index not just using bing (i think they still use them for images tho). it was really nice to hear somebody else is working on that even if i'm not using it rn.
I have issues with the Brave browser but I am a big fan of their search product. Just the fact that they are building their own index was enough for me to switch, but I've had better luck with finding useful search results than I previously had with DDG. YMMV, of course. Their forum search results section has been very useful, too.
Didn't know about Brave's Index. I just emailed them to find out how I can help with the bottom line of making human knowledge accessible for lesser-idiots. Thanks!
R.I.P.