How to get Google's PageRank without a toolbar

[ZackDude]

Google has it's little pagerank fit into the toolbar, however does anyone know how to get the page rank of a url from a webpage. eg, google.com/whatever/pagerank?url=webmasterworld.com which returns 9 or whatever. Is their anything like that. Or possibly is it a feature in Google API?

Thanks,
Zack

[jeremy goodrich]

If the url is in the Open Directory, check out directory.google.com for the url, they have a PR measure next to the sites there.

Alternatively, if you read through the documentation on the Google API - not sure if they offer PageRank data through that or not, but it's worth a read to find out I would say :)

From what I've noticed, however, PageRank increasingly plays a smaller role in Google's ranking of websites...so, it may be better for you to ignore it entirely, imho.

[ZackDude]

well the directory thing doesn't really help, it's just a picture, and last time I checked which was 2 minutes ago, I didn't see anything on pagerank in the api documentation. But it has to be somewhere...

[jeremy goodrich]

>>>>>has to be somewhere...

Nope, it's in the toolbar - what better incentive to get people to consent to their surfing habits being monitored by Google than to give them a 'value added' feature? ;)

[jeremy goodrich]

As I said, it's available through the Google toolbar - a clever programmer (as the person who runs that site undoubtedly is) could build an application that interacted / masqueraded as the toolbar to query google & get the pagerank data. If you have ever done 'packet sniffing' on the Google toolbar, it wouldn't be too hard if you were a skilled programmer to do so.

However, I would expect Google to come down, hard on anybody that did as that site did :)

[jrobbio]

I thought about this idea a while back, but came to the same conclusion as Jeremy did. Probably the same reason why mozilla developers are afraid to make any attempt to try and port the PR.

Rob

[ZackDude]

well it would be nice for google to post the pagerank like alexa eg, [alexa.com...] and post other stats and graphs.
They can probably even make money putting the rank in xml feeds like alexa too. (Of course for developers you can just parse out the traffic rank instead of buying the xml)

BTW I found a site that kinda gets googles pagerank off and shows you it, but the moderators won't let me post it so send me a stickymail if you want it.

[Storyteller]

Getting PR values without ANY use of the toolbar is certaintly not easy. Each toolbar query contains a generated key, which is only valid for a given URL, and can pretty much be IP- or time-bound.

However, devising a technology for unattended PR queries isn't too hard. I'm bulk-querying a 60K+ domain list at this very moment, goes pretty fast so far ;)

[Astinus]

Storyteller: "and can pretty much be IP- or time-bound".

So do you find that the URLs expire?

[Fiver]

Storyteller said:
However, devising a technology for unattended PR queries isn't too hard. I'm bulk-querying a 60K+ domain list at this very moment, goes pretty fast so far ;)

so, does that mean you hacked the ch key algo? Or found a workaround?

do tell.

[Storyteller]

Astinus, no, this was just an idea. I was going to investigate that, but then found another way.

Fiver, yes, I've found a workaround.

[WebRankInfo]

I have developed a tool that gives an estimation of the PageRank of a page.
I don't think I can post the URL here, so sticky mail me if you're interested.