Google Page Rank Love!

8 months into blogging and finally, that bit of Googlized love that every domain owner craves for: Page Rank! I figured out that since it had been several days since I had obsessed over my stats, it was time that I re-executed this exercise in futility. Little did I know unknown to me, The Big G had a surprise waiting for me!

Here is what the Wiki has to say about Google PR:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page^[1] and used by the Google Internetsearch engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of ahyperlinked set of documents, such as theWorld Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocalquotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network (PageRanks reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it; the link it has is of a much higher value. A web surfer who chooses a random link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no outgoing links.

A great summarization of all this technical mumbo jumbo is availabe at Smashing Magazine.