Jeremy Zawodny declares "PageRank is Dead". For the unititiated, PageRank is Google's method for determining website relavence. Jeremy writes that the days of PageRank are numbered because bloggers, among others, have learned how to game the system.

Though, I think Jeremy's got it wrong. Just because PageRank has been around a couple years and just because Google does not produce consistent results does not mean it is teatering on irrelavence. It simply means that it needs some tweaking, and I have a good feeling this is exactly what Google is currently working on. There has been a lot of chatter lately about blogging and its effects on Google, and its only natural that Google must and will adapt. Certainly there is more to Google than just the PageRank formula. I'm sure there are many different parameters and its just time to add and fiddle with them.

Jeremy and I agree that Google has a hard problem to solve, but in my estimation its just a small subset of the PageRank paradigm. I don't think it calls for something as new and revolutionary as PageRank was. Further, I just see the general sense of the blog entry as "Orlowskian"-- making a grand internet-related claim to generate traffic. And based on the responses he received, it seems most are merely preoccupied with their own modding down of their own name in Google's results. Thus, what's in a name? If PageRank gets a tweaking, is it not still to be called PageRank?

One responder to his blog definitely got it right. A google search for search engine doesn't even return Google first. Obviously, that just tells you its a work in progress.

By Gary at 08:34 PM in Sci/Tech | Comments (5)  

Recent reports say that Google is working on a special search system just for weblogs. I imagine that this separate system will somehow also work to reduce the effect of weblogs on page relevance.

Posted by: Leonard at May 29, 2003 07:05 PM

I think the shouldn't consider the cross links for the blog pages.

Posted by: Benedetto Colicci at October 21, 2003 05:10 AM

Yeah, I too had read the Jeremy's Article.
But Now search for Jeremy would return his blog rather than his webpage.
Again regarding searching the keyword "Search engine" it returns other coz, the term search engine (treat like regex) appears less and smaller font than the previous ones.

Now, I see that Blogs are indexed.
PageRank has been a good system until now.
Lets see how it goes forward.

Nice blog Lerhaupt. I dropped at your blog following linux.dell
Kudos!

Posted by: Senthil at January 29, 2004 04:59 AM

Well, about 10 months after Jeremy's article, Pagerank seems to be far from dead. Though it seems like it is not the only measure for Google to judge a pages value anymore, high PR sites still do very well in the rankings, even after the latest, hefty updates. Pagerank is dead, long live Pagerank!

Posted by: Tom at March 13, 2004 09:42 AM

I've been waiting for the death of pagerank - tending to believe the supposed experts. But I wake up one day and see the new google toolbar and think pagerank is more alive than ever.

Posted by: Artfulblogger at May 6, 2004 11:49 PM