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I wonder why Google does not give us the possibility to tweak the relevance of PR. Sometimes I want to read the opinions of lonely eremites rather than the opinion of the well-referenced mainstream. It find it very strange that PR is a fixed value. The WWW is in first place not a place of authority but a conglomeration of people. Although often one needs to find settled data fast, on other times one likes to stroll through the dirty streets and occasionally find something NEW.
A set of three different importances of PR (none, gentle, traditional) should suffice. Or, Google would rewrite algorithms from scatch. I do not know by how much computation and storage costs would rise, but I think that an adjustable PR importance is absolutly necessary.
Uli
Welcome to Webmaster Wordl [webmasterworld.com].
As a searcher I agree with you that PR tends to mask many very relevant and authoritative sites and returns those that work at winning the popularity contest. As Google has built it brand on PR and uses that to differentiate itself from other search engines, don't look for it to change anytime soon.
The Internet takes care of that by having choices only seconds away. Other commercial search engines such as Teoma/Jeeves are tweaking away and returning, for my searches, very relevant results. And there are many specialized SEs and directories that concentrate on most any field in which folks might have an interest. (And I can always hope that one of my old favorites, Northern Light, makes its promised comeback.)
DMOZ [dmoz.org] is a good start for more narrowly-focused engines and directories.
Get out and about and you're bound to find something new.
Jim
And I do not think that competition can solve this problem anyway. One root of the problem is spam (in the wider meaning of the word: pages who use tricks in order to get more attention than they deserve). See, if murders run around in the streets, one must stay at home. When murders have a monopoly on the streets, no competition is possible. Although most inhabitants of the city would like to support the competition in order to break the monopoly, they cannot. The same goes for the internet: [grassomusic.de...]
I feel that the greatest problem is mentality. People like to be taken for a ride, they like to be lied to, they like to be dehumiliated and dirty and stinking all over like carrion. The elite and their secret services do not face any resistance because people "go on and cheat like all the rest!"
Uli
