I feel like we're talking past each other. Personalization of search results is orthogonal to this article and discussion so I'm going to pass on responding to

I feel like we're talking past each other. Personalization of search results is orthogonal to this article and discussion so I'm going to pass on responding to your points there. As for PageRank, I really appreciate the Wikipedia link. Super helpful. If you're arguing that PR is not subjective because it uses an algorithm, my response is: the algorithm encodes subjective judgements about how to evaluate "quality" in a web page. For example, the subjective judgement that a web page is likely to be of higher quality if there are a lot of other high quality web pages that link to it.