Giacomo - 3:38 pm on Feb 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

Nice analysis, ciml. However, as I said in my other post (PageRank Feedback Loops [webmasterworld.com]), this is just pure theoric speculation which is probably not going to be of any help in the "real world" of a 2-billion-page Web which is constantly changing and growing at an impressive rate.

Still, I'd like to point out what seems to me a unique feature of PageRank: i.e., the fact that PR's accuracy or reliability appears to increase proportionally as the Web (the pool of available data for PR calculation) grows larger and larger. Or at least, that's what should be inferred from the original recursive formula. That's a really outstanding characteristic that is intrinsic to the PageRank algorithm, and probably one of the main reasons of Google's enormous success over its competitors, especially those not incorporating link structure analysis in their ranking mechanisms. It's not a coincidence, IMO, that Google's rise went hand in hand with an increase in the Web's growth rate: while the major SE's struggled to keep up with it, Google simply exploited it in a very smart way for its own success.
Therefore, I wasn't very surprised to read what Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said about growth being the biggest challenge for Google today. Personally I would add:
2) staying fresh and up-to-date;
3) discerning "real" content from spam.
Besides, that's just confirmed by what Google appears to be doing lately...

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;

You can easily reach that threshold (10,000 unique pages) with a database-driven, intensively-crosslinked dynamic web site (and good content) nowadays. However, I agree that quality inbound links and good directory listings are still essential (not only for PR, but also for your site's traffic in the first place). I mean, Google is currently the most important source of referred traffic, and will probably stay so for a long time, but (luckily enough) it's not the only one, especially for highly-specialized, "niche" web sites. So in the end I still agree with those (like Paul Boutin in his article [hotwired.lycos.com]) who have warned us from focusing exclusively on Google-specific SEO "tricks", often neglecting other factors which may reveal themselves even more important for a web site's success in the long term.
So I don't believe the "small stuff" is ever going to make a big difference after all.