Ho John Lee's Weblog

P.R.A.S.E., aka “Prase” is a new web tool for examining the PageRank assigned to top search results at Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Search terms are entered in the usual way, but a combined list of results from the three search engines is presented in PageRank order, from highest to lowest, along with the search engine and result rank.

I tried a few search queries, such as “web 2.0″, “palo alto”, “search algorithm”, “martin luther king”, and was surprised to see how quickly the PageRank 0 pages start turning up in the search results. For “web 2.0″, the top result on Yahoo is the Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0, which seems reasonable, but it’s also a PR0 page, which is surprising to me.

As a further experiment, I tried a few keywords from this list of top paying search terms, with generally similar results.

PageRank is only used by Google, which no longer uses the original PageRank algorithm for ranking results, but it’s still interesting to see the top search results from the three major search engines laid out with PR scores to get some sense of the page linkage.

See also:

• More on the site from the author at Don Johnson Design
• A reading list on PageRank and search algorithms

via Seomoz:

This week’s Newsweek (December 12, 2005) features an article on white hat vs black hat search engine optimization. Among other things, it’s interesting that the topic has made it into the mainstream media.

A “black hat” anecdote:

Using an illicit software program he downloaded from the Net, he forcibly injected a link to his own private-detectives referral site onto the site of Long Island’s Stony Brook University. Most search engines give a higher value to a link on a reputable university site.

The site in question appears to be “www.private-detectives.org”, still currently #1 at MSN and #4 at Yahoo for searches on “private detectives”. It appears to have been sandboxed on Google.

Another interesting post at Seomoz features comments from “randfish” and “EarlGrey”, the two SEO consultants interviewed by Newsweek on the merits of “White Hat” vs “Black Hat” search engine optimization, and gives further perspective on the motivation and outlook of the two approaches.

In some ways one can think of the difference between search engine optimization approaches as a “trading” approach vs a “building” approach to investment. The “Black Hat” approach articulated in the Seomoz article tends to focus purely on a tactical present cash return to the operator, while the “White Hat” approach presumes that the operator will realize ongoing future value by developing a useful information asset and making it visible to the search engines. This makes an implicit assumption that the site itself offers some unique and valuable information content, which can’t usually be the case in the long run.

From an information retrieval point of view, I’m obviously in the latter camp of thinking that identifying the most relevant results for the search user is a good thing. However, the black hat approach makes perfect sense if you consider it in terms of optimizing the short term value return to the publisher (cash as information), while possibly still presenting a useable information return to the search user. This is especially the case for commodity information or products, in which the actual information or goods are identical, such as affiliate sales.

I’m a little curious about the link from Stony Brook University. I took a quick look but wasn’t able to turn up a backlink. One of the problems with simply relying on trusted link sources is that they can be gamed, corrupted, or hacked.

See also: A reading list on PageRank and search algorithms

Update 12-12-2005 00:30 PST: Lots of comments on Matt Cutt’s post, plus Slashdot