Measuring "Importance"
(Google's link analysis algorithm)
Most people were completely unaware that a database called WordNet, (created by the Cognitive Science Laboratory), already had an incredibly sophisticated search algorithm in 1985. Don't forget that the world wide web, (as we know it),was only proposed as an idea in 1989 and didn't even become publicly available until 1991.
To this day, WordNet is still "the one and only" lexical database for the English language and is currently maintained by Princeton University's psychology professor George Miller. So what does "lexical data-base" mean exactly?
WordNet's lexical database, is, in essence, an "artificial intelligence" database so to speak. It's "functionality" is based on every known rule of grammar and word sense disambiguation, (WSD), which means it recognizes and understands the word usage and placement for every possible permutation of an English sentence.
In fact, a single word, whether common or slang, can be examined by the system and it can distinguish the correct context from every other possible contextual meaning that word may have in relation to any subject; in either past, present, or future tenses.
So you might be asking , " so what does this have to do with page rank and PageRankCheckers?" Remember we said that PageRank is a link analysis algorithm? Well, the facts are, that when it comes to SEO, links are links to "content" not just websites.
Although the Google search algorithm, is comprised of many factors,( over 200), one of the major components of the algorithm now, is the ongoing implementation of WordNet's Lexical database and inherent word sense disambiguation, (WSD) for identifying "correlations" and "sets" of "content" that suggest "importance"!
In the past Google has used inbound links as one of the indicators of importance in awarding a value and that was the value that a PageRankChecker obtained from Google.
However, many believe that Google is already moving away from publicly disclosing any kind of PageRank value, and is actually giving PR less and less weight. This is because of the number of manipulations ie; spam-dexing and link farming to content that is poorly written, or completely irrelevant.
It is, however, becoming clearer and clearer that "excellent content" is an extremely weighty and significant factor in determining "importance" for search engine ranking and scoring high in search engine result pages.
This is why a greater implementation of a "WordNet" type system, is becoming more and more necessary.
Eventually it means that every page of content, in Google's index of content, will be crawled and compared to each other, under the full scope of WordNet's powerful analysis. It is hoped, that when this lexical database is fully implemented, only sites with the highest quality, freshest, and most relevant content will thrive.
In some ways, "PageRanking" actually isn't going away, but just taking on a whole new form, along with a brand new criteria for measuring.
In fact, this same line of thinking has inspired and spawned other similar architectures such as the " EuroWordNet" project, which has "WordNets" for several European languages all designed to refine search results.
I find it fascinating that since the beginning of written language, the importance of a text was determined purely by it's contribution. It was the compelling message of the content alone that made people take note, and the only people who were even remotely interested in the lexical study of the written language were scientists, and the interest was simply to look at the relationships between words for scientific classification, and had nothing to do with determining the importance of literature.
I'm sure, if asked, if they thought that using lexical parameters could be a way to determine the quality, relevance and importance of the writings of Aristotle,Mark Twain, Tolkien or Tolstoy, they might have laughed that notion right out of the room.
Having said that, it is actually the scientists of the early 19th century, that painstakingly classified every noun, verb, adjective and adverb into their sub categories of: hypernyms; hyponyms; holonyms; meronyms and coordinate terms, that have, in the end, greatly helped Google, return well written, relevant and important content in search results!
It may be a little unclear how importance is actually determined and even whether or not Google will continue to provide a page rank rating to PageRankCheckers in the future, but one thing is for certain, and that is great content will likely continue to play a big role in determining high ranking results.
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