Chris_R - 6:10 pm on Apr 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

PageRank does not work like that. It is a known equation and the number of visits has no bearing on it.

A page's ranking (which is what I suspect you meant anyway) may very well should have extra emphasis put on it by the amount of trafffic it receives.

Google did mention this in one of their papers.

However, google is smart enough to know the difference between one webmaster working on their pages and legitimate traffic. They would most likely only count each toolbar once.

This will probably be used to some extent in the future - especially after google starts customizing their pages for specific users.

I am sure you are right that google is collecting this data, I don't think they are using it yet.

And your point about PR is well taken in that a page with good page rank doesn't mean it gets many visits - such as the yahoo privacy pages. Great PageRank, but who cares about those pages.

the toolbar I am sure holds great promise for the future.