John Battelle thinks PageRank is "deeply broken", kind of

Jordan Golson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:18:16 -0400

Federated Media adman and search master John Battelle (who, incidentally, founded The Industry Standard a long time ago) has a bone to pick with a technology at the heart of Google's empire: PageRank.

Google uses the technology to measure and rank the importance of Web pages. The algorithm developed by Larry, Sergey & co. considers "more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms" and somehow boils all that down to a number between 0 and 10. The higher the PageRank, the "more important" the webpage is and the higher it ranks in search results.

Battelle's beef: Google doesn't give any detailed information on how it assigns a particular rank to a site. "It's just deeply broken -- not because there isn't data that informs all of our collective rank. But because we have no idea what that data really is, or how it's combined to determine value in the Google economy," Battelle said on his blog.

Battelle also told me that "PageRank is a totem for Google juju. It feeds mysticism." Battelle doesn't have a problem with ageRank per se, just that we get a sliver of information -- a number, 0-10 -- and nothing else.

It's highly unlikely that Google will release any additional information about how it determines PageRank. It's a proprietary technology, and competitors and scammers would benefit from its release. All Google will say about PageRank is that "important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results."

Should Google shareholders care about this debate? Not really. Regardless of whether the company releases a few tidbits of information about PageRank, the company will continue to make buckets of money from search advertising unless something better comes along.

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

Analysis: Google pushes towards 70 percent of all U.S. searches; Yahoo, Microsoft push towards zero percent
Analysis: The future of the Web is 3D, not video
Analysis: Microsoft's struggle to innovate and lead on the 'Net
News: The 3D future, according to Microsoft: A Photosynth-based "Spatial Web"
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