Voices in the Feminine - Digital Delights

The brilliance of Google's PageRank is not the computational methods behind it but the target of those methods: links created by people in the course of making something meaningful on the Web. Without that human input, Google (and Bing and Yahoo) would be simply counting up term frequencies and perhaps analyzing linguistic characteristics, but missing most of what makes Web searching work. The results would be at least as bad as the ranking on Google Books because it would be devoid of the human commitment of significant connections between the pages.

Although Google's mission statement is "... to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," Google is not really organizing anything. It is reading the organization provided by the Web's population. Similarly, Facebook is reading the relationships between people that are made in the course of using its software, information that it would not have otherwise.

What has made the web the rich environment that it is is that anyone can link anything to anything else. That linking is an expression; and even though we might not be able to characterize it in a few words (what does it mean that page A links to page B?) Google has shown that we can make use of those patterns of linking to help people find stuff on the Web that meets their needs.