Did You Know Google Loves You?
In case you were interested in knowing your relationship to PageRank in a socio-political way.
The fatal attraction of the masses for Google seems to rely more on its mystical power to set a spectacular value for anything and anybody than
on the precision of its results. Rumours say that PageRank will be replaces soon by TrustRank, another algorithm developed by Stanford University and Yahoo researchers to separate useful webpages from spam and establish a sort of community trust or a new cybernetic social pact across the internet.
The whole thing at: http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/Pasquineli_PageRank.pdf
At the heart of [Google] is the PageRank algorithm that Brin and Page wrote while they were graduate students at Stanford in the 1990. They saw that every time a person with a Web site links to another site, he is expressing a judgment. He is declaring that he considers the other site important. They further realized that while every link on the Web contains a little bit of human intelligence, all the links combined contain a great deal of intelligence – far more, in fact, that any individual mind could possibly posses.
Google’s search engine mines that intelligence, link by link, and uses it to determine the importance of all the pages on the Web. The greater the number of link that lead to a site, the greater its value. As John Markoff puts it, Google’s software “systematically exploits human knowledge and
decisions about what is significant”. Every time we write a link, or even click on one, we are feeding our intelligence into Google’s system. We are making the machine a little smarter – and Brin, Page, and all of Google’s shareholders a little richer. — Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch1