I have been thinking about the Google Page Rank and how it is self influencing. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is sometimes represented as “whatever you study, you also change†and although this is more accurately called the observer principle for this post it will do. Underlining the concepts of Page Rank is the principle of determining the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. It is the use of probability in determining the likeihood of randomly finding a page which also makes page rank self influencing. If Google didn’t exist then the ideas behind page rank would be true, however the very existence of the Google search engine has disrupted the likeihood of finding a page randomly and so it has disrupted the page rank. Today large portions of traffic to web sites comes from people clicking on the results from a Google search. If I am looking for reviews of a certain car brand, I will type in a search into Google and follow the links presented to me. If I like a page I see, maybe I will bookmark it or even blog about it or maybe include a link on my website. The result is that because I found a page on the search engine (based partly on its page rank) I then added a link to that page and thus increased its page rank by casting another vote for that site. This means that pages placed at the top of the results pages have a greater chance of gaining more links to themselves. By trying to measure the importance of a web page, Google have in fact changed the importance of that web page and so the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle becomes true of page rank. QED Gary PS. You can find the full text of this argument with extra definitions for SEO newbies here.
Nice post. Google does affect sites page rank by making a site popular more sites link to it. It is a never ending cycle.
I've also been thinking of this relationship in terms of toolbar pagerank updates.... it seems that constantly checking my pagerank causes it to not update Apparently it's true that "a watched pot never boils"...or rather "a watched Google toolbar never updates."
Nice post in here, Pagerank is really simply/complicated no body know what is the real pagerank alogarithm we all stuck with what will work and increase ours.