ciml - 11:46 am on Feb 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

gravybigs:
> The only accurate prediction, or information on Google is Google.

If you read back through Chris_R's posts you'll find plenty of useful information that you will find direct from Google. That said, there's plenty of useful information at google.com/webmasters/ that people don't take enough notice of, and much of the truly interesting information was written more than three years ago by Brin/Page.

Giacomo:
> I mean, the total amount of energy in a closed system remains unchanged, but there can be warmer and colder spots here and there, now and then.

A very good analogy. Google evenly removes a proportion of PageRank, and then evenly distributes it (though the redistribution need not be even); rather like a perfectly conductive (and therefore uniformly hot) heat sink, slightly insulated (85%-ish) from the main body but completely insulated from the outside world. This converges into a steady state. It might make more sense to replace the heat sink analogy with QED, but I don't understand that. Anyway, the 'rank source' is exactly the reason that 'perpetual motion PageRank' machines don't work (nice term, Chris_R), but it's also how you can 'create' PageRank without inbound links.

To get hot you can collect enough items together to share their "random surfer" heat. As the total number of items is now over two billion, you'd need a huge (awesome) number of pages. Depending on the base of the logarithms in the ToolBar, it might take 10,000 pages to generate just PR5; it's easier to get a link from someone with PR6. I've noticed that some significant adult-related terms have quite low PageRank; this may have much to do with the difficulty in finding good inbounds.

Chris_R:
> 4) People put way to much emphasis on the small stuff.
> 5) Google isn't that much different than it was when it started.
[...]
> Everything you need to know to do well in Google is already on here.

I agree with everything else you wrote, but the differences between the early Google and the current Google can make a huge difference (eg. if you loose all your PageRank). It may well be the ‘small stuff’ that helps us find the key to avoid being the next victim (of what most of us now believe to be) an aggressive anti-spam policy.

As with most aggressibe policing methods, a few innocents get rounded up and I'd rather not become one of them (assuming, of course, that I'm an innocent).

Calum