Friday, March 1, 2002

"Interesting article explains how the Church of Scientology manages its relationship with Google."  [Scripting News] It's also wrong in its understanding of PageRank. A tightly connected set of sites (a "nest") that is not linked from many highly-ranked outside sites does not acquire high rank from the dense internal linkage. The basic PageRank model is that of a surfer that chooses a start page at random, then keeps choosing at random whether to jump to a new random page or to follow a random link to a new page. The rank of a page is the probability that a page will be visited by the surfer following this process. In the case at hand, the surfer would be unlikely to get to the nest given its limited linkage from likely ourside sites, and likely to leave the nest when it chooses to hop off to a new random page rather than follow a random link. 8:15:41 PM