Link Ranks
http://www.miswebdesign.com/resources/articles/pagerank-9.html
Like in all theoretical methods, Google’s PageRank is susceptible in practice to a variety of other factors, many based upon human behavior. The creator of PageRank himself, Lawrence Page, lists a few of these potential influences as the level of visibility of links, the positioning of links within the webpage, the distancing between certain web pages, the importance of linking pages, as well as the level of “up-to-dateness” of linking pages. These additional factors are important in evaluating page ranks because realistically, true web users will not click on links in a web page completely by random. Of course, there will be certain other factors, such as the ones listed above and more, that will influence users to click on one link rather than another. For example, if a particular link is further down a webpage relative to another link, then users are more likely to click the link at the top, as not all users will scroll down far enough to view that particular link. With factors as important as these, the PageRank method should have some formula for accommodation.
By including these factors, this method to approximate human web usage will be far more accurate. Essentially, to take these factors into consideration mathematically, evaluations of specific links replace evaluations of the pages themselves, which itself takes into consideration many factors.
Specifically, Page explains his reasoning for the “up-to-dateness” factors of linking pages. If a webpage has been modified recently, then it does not necessarily contain more important information, but that is what is suggested if these documents are further weighted; in fact the outbound links should be considered more fully. Therefore, there is importance in ranking links, not just pages.
In class, we discussed web pages and ranks under the general consideration that users may randomly and arbitrarily click on links; however, considering real web users who value certain aspects in a web page more than others, many links will be valued as more important than others by the general population.