Bottler - 11:53 am on Apr 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

but I very much doubt that the starting point is critical beyond the first few iterations.

I'm not talking about the initial PageRank vector as used in the power method for the conditioned transition matrix. I am talking about the conditioning vector or what Google refers to lately as the "personalization vector" which is used in every iteration.

It's the vector of probabilities of where a user jumps to if she is bored with the current page or there are no links on the page.