Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4. Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone started at

Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4. Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone started at 0 they pass on nothing. Google needed a way to seed. They assigned the highest value to themselves scaling down to other giants, universities, dmoz sites, etc. Pagerank is a reputation calculator. You still need to define at least one cool person. Much better with thousands to varying degrees.