> Of the references you list, only the PageRank one has anything to do with the search algorithm. ... > There are more than 200 other signals used to determin

> Of the references you list, only the PageRank one has anything to do with the search algorithm. ... > There are more than 200 other signals used to determine relevance, and PageRank is only one of them (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html). The others are completely secret as far as I can tell, and there's no indication what weight is given to PageRank now. I gave a link to http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html which links to http://research.google.com/pubs/InformationRetrieval.html http://research.google.com/pubs/InformationRetrieval.html which links to http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35599.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35599.html and http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1571941.1572114 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1571941.1572114 among many other papers that talk about signals other than link structure and means of combining signals to derive a relevance ranking. But, sure, Google has large scope and importance, and they do have secrets (about search rankings and other topics). Policy statements and economics papers they've published about the alignment of users' interests with their own are only suggestive and don't guarantee good behavior. As long as they have secrets we can't be sure they're not doing evil (or even just failing to serve each of us as well and faithfully as possible).