Why I’ve lost faith in Google
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
If you're reading this, I'm sure you've probably stumbled across countless other blog posts by people complaining that Google has slapped their blog with a Page Rank penalty. I'm also sure you've read countless rants on the increasingly irrelevant position Page Rank occupies in the world wide web. I'm not really sure that is actually true. We can write about it, or we can ignore it, but the fact of the matter is that so long as this thing called Page Rank exists, site owners will continue to be slave to the Google machine, in one way or another.
What does PageRank represent?
Let's refer to that fountain of wisdom that Google apparently values quite highly, Wikipedia:
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.
Google's own definition of what PageRank represents is a little simpler to follow:
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
The most interesting thing I found while searching for the formal PageRank definition was that the Wikipedia explanation (when I ran a Google search for "Google PageRank") was the number 1 search result, while Google's definition on their own corporate site was second. What does this mean? Is Wikipedia a 'more important' source than the organisation in which the information originally came from? You can run a Google search for pretty much anything and there's a good chance that a Wikipedia entry will turn up in the top spot, or at least rank very highly. Take 'quantum physics' as an example. The Wikipedia entry currently appears at the number one spot, does that mean that Wikipedia is the most important, most credible and most reliable source of information on the topic of quantum physics? Wikipedia? A website that anyone can edit content, no matter what their qualifications, is the most trusted source of information on a topic like Quantum Physics? That seems a little dodgy to me, but I've gone way off track...
So basically we are led to believe that PageRank represents the worth of a web page in the eyes of Google. The worth of a web page in the eyes of Google then becomes the worth of a web page in the eyes of other web masters. (more...)