Mind Your P’s & R’s

June 6th, 2007 . by admin

I’ll apologize in advance for beating this horse which is very much dead and gone, however:
After reading some highly visible misinformation about PageRank recently I would like to offer a few points of clarification on the Larry Page brainchild:

PageRank is not an evaluation of content (In and of itself it does not consider anchors, body text, etc.).
PageRank is a query-independent evaluation of the relative importance of a given document.
PageRank is not “improved”, increased or affected in any way via manipulation of document content.
PageRank data is not available via the Google toolbar.
PageRank calculators are generally only useful in the context of intellectual exercises and simple architectural experimentation. The only way to accurately calculate PageRank is to implement a system which performs the iterations across Google’s entire document set. In other words to do what Google does.
PageRank is not the most interesting (or important) feature of Google’s document retrieval and sorting algorithms.