If I did, I'd be number one on Google for everything lol. It's not that simple to say it works like 'x'. But I know stuff like PR isn't really an indicator of anythign anymore. Just boils down to if you've got fresh quality content, and recurring incoming quality links, you'll rank highly.
As far as I know, nobody knows the exact answer to that question and Google fully intends to keep it that way. Google also changes algorithms frequently on purpose to keep the experts guessing about what they are doing because one of Google's prime selling points to advertisers is their independence from all other advertisers and Internet players. Google does not want anybody who is in the SEO profession to have access to what they consider to be Top Secret Eyes Only Information and they are actually quite proud on the corporate management level that they do not favor anybody at all by releasing proprietary search engine algorithm information to anybody.
Capistrano is right to the point. There's no way they will let out the information or make it public so that everyone would know about it. It will be subjected to manipulation.
The exact algorithm is not known to anyone but yes the fresh content, frequent changes and posting of new content on the website is helpful. Also latent symmetric indexing is the new funda on google which crawls the meaningful content for similar phrase/meaning words even if you don't have those words. The link building from quality content pages is highly recommended and directory submission without good quality directories is no more entertained.