Searchengine Blog: Interview with Chris Ridings

One of the reasons that PageRank is so hard to explain and understand is because it is analogous to something we all do all the time without thinking about it. Consider I want to buy a new DVD player, I might ask a group of friends what the best DVD player to buy is. Now some of them are going to give me names of DVD players, but some of them are going to say "I don't know, Tim knows a lot about DVD players". When I talk to Tim, I have a greater respect for his advice because everybody said he knows this stuff. Now if Tim says "Ask Harry too, he knows a lot about DVD players", then despite the fact that nobody else has told me to ask Harry I can assume that Harry probably does know more than the rest (although probably not more than Tim).

PageRank is the same mechanism. Instead of trying to find out who knows most about DVDs, it tries to find out what pages are the most "important". It's hard to actually "ask" a page something, and talking to a computer monitor is not the best way to impress your colleagues, so they make a general assumption. That assumption is "If a page links to another page then it thinks that page is important". There are lots of things wrong with this assumption, but you said "briefly" so I'll leave people to research more if they want to. Just like Tim's advice to "ask Harry also" is given greater weighting because most people told me to ask Tim, if a page has lots of "important" links, when it says another page is important then PageRank gives that more merit.

"The best blogs are written with conversation in mind"

Bowbrick at large. My latest column for Guardian Online is up. It's headlined Secret of their success and it's about weblogs and the... [bowblog]

J:L this is one of the best descriptions of state of effective blog speech.