Though PageRank has the innovation of weighting the connections based on how important the information is. (Just for fun, here's one linear-algebra-free way to

Though PageRank has the innovation of weighting the connections based on how important the information is. (Just for fun, here's one linear-algebra-free way to understand classic PageRank: imagine starting from a random page on the internet and then randomly clicking links. If you continue clicking for long enough, then the probability that you end up on any given page is, more or less, its PageRank. If your access patterns with Zettelkasten are random-ish and you keep track of how many times you look at each card, then these counts are a crude approximation of the PageRank of your cards.)