Interesting content about Google PageRank algorithm
Found in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
The information is not new; basically it’s about the importance of having related links – both inbound and outbound – on your websites. I still find the author’s description intesteting and well written.
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.