I guess no one has come up with a better way. If you introduce a new system, it has to be at least as good as what we have now: no one would want to sacrifice

I guess no one has come up with a better way. If you introduce a new system, it has to be at least as good as what we have now: no one would want to sacrifice relevant results. It is wrong to think about pagerank as a single algorithm: it is a family, the common things being that these algorithms analyze the global link graph (yes, I lumped the HITS algorithm in the same family). The problem is, if you don't use the link graph, there is not much left. There is the content, but this is not enough: before Google you could often steal someone's high ranking by just copying his content verbatim or maybe tweaking it a little. So, pagerank is actually a big improvement over what was out there before. Pagerank can be thought as an estimation of the traffic a website gets. Suppose you can measure the actual traffic (e.g. by forcing all sites to install google analytics). That would be a pretty well gaming-proofed system, but you would introduce so much inertia - every new site would have a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.