Everyman - 7:21 am on Aug 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

Filipe says:

The idea is not just that sites vote for you, but that sites relevant to yours vote for you. If a site is considered an important site in your sector or theme, and they vote for you, that means that a site that knew what they were talking about thinks you know what you're talking about too.

I don't think so. "Importance" is defined relative to PageRank. The formula feeds on itself recursively.

Here's an example of how PageRank works:

Salon - PR of 9. Yellow liberal journalism at its worst. I never mentioned the words "Rumsfeld" or "United Airlines." I actually told Mr. Manjoo, the interviewer and author of the Salon piece, that I thought my site did okay in Google, and that I was speaking as a representative of the public interest. The "royal we" he refers to is because I speak for Public Information Research, Inc. (www.pir.org). By the way, the www.namebase.org site he linked in the article is not the site in Google. That's an unadorned CGI site that's frequently disallowed from Google because I tend to get penalized when it isn't. If you want to slam me for my crummy little site, then go to the www.pir.org site that I told Mr. Manjoo was our main site, not the www.namebase.org site that he decided to link in the article.

Slashdot - PR of 9. Mindless, reactionary blogging at its worst from script-kiddies who can't spell. They accuse me of technical incompetence for not knowing how to disable cookies, and then add that there's no way that little cookie could store 36 years of data in any case. What complete idiots.

WebmasterWorld - PR of 8. Folks are getting smarter here. Only half of the comments are idiotic, and the other half are well-informed.

www.pir.org - PR of 7. Smarter still. That's my site. Full of essays and book reviews. Lots of names. For serious researchers. Been around for a long, long time. The only charge that Oliver North was convicted on came from an obscure name linked to North that was discovered by a journalist in 1987 using my database. With results like this, repeated many times over many years, I can survive without Slashdot's approval (or even without Google's approval). Let's see now, what was PageRank doing in 1987?

www.cia-on-campus.org - PR of 6. Only site in the world that deals with the history of the CIA's involvement on U.S. campuses. Most of the material was painstakingly transcribed from old yellow articles and documents.

www.google-watch.org - Too new to be ranked, but I predict a 5 for it on the next cycle. Yes, I know how to delete my cookies. There's a 25 percent chance that I can even steal your Explorer cookie in my Google cookie demo (depends on whether your version of Explorer is vulnerable to this exploit). I hope GoogleGuy likes my anonymous Google proxy and doesn't block us, otherwise I'll have to write it up and switch to an Inktomi proxy. Proxy use is limited to 10 searches per hour per IP number. There are also load monitors that kick in because we don't have 10,000 servers.

Most of the work on this google-watch site was done to highlight my concern over Google's cookies and the privacy issues they raise. Mr. Manjoo mentioned cookies in the article, but not very prominently, given that half of the interview was about cookies. Sheesh, I have just one short essay on PageRank!

I was going to add an essay about Google's cache and why I don't like it. But so many people think it's so cool from a user's point of view (it's webmasters who lose here, not the user), that I didn't think I'd get anyone to agree with me. Now it seems like that was a silly reason not to write the essay! (I need an essay on the toolbar too. I'm brimming with opinions on the toolbar.)

So you see, PageRank allows mediocrity to rise to the top. Once on top, a site's power to suppress anything outside of "conventional wisdom" due to its PageRank, insures that mediocrity prevails.

To quote CmdrTaco at Slashdot: "Google's system seems to work the best if you ask me but, on the other hand, link popularity may not provide the most intelligent top rankings."

You got the last part right, Commander with a PR of 9. Just click and read the comments below from your assorted Slashdotters.