Google is the universe

As you may have heard, I've been learning all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately. I just came across this amazing little service called the DigPageRank Pagerank Checker. The story goes something like this.

Google assigns every single page in the whole internet a numerical score called the Page Rank (PR). It somehow says something about how important that page is and consequently how high it should appear in your Google search results.

Like Astrology , you can find lots of debate all around the web on how PR is computed, whether it means something or not. And when Google tweaks their algorithms so that a particular web page goes up or down in PR, then this is big news in the SEO community. It's a fact that where your site shows up in search results can have a dramatic financial impact on your business.

So it's a world of move/countermove - a veritable arms race as Google tweaks it's algorithm and web sites try to game the algorithm to raise their Page Rank. And back and forth.

So back to this site the PageRank Checker. Type in a URL you will see not simply the PageRank of said referenced page, but what the Page Rank is of that page according to dozens of separate Google data centers.

What I find so fascinating about this report is that it raises the lid on the unbelievably complex super-parallel-global-spanning-computer-brain that Google has become.

I had heard about these data centers, but that there are so many, and that the analysis of the PR of a certain page potentially yields different numbers is interesting. It means that the PR calculation is done somehow separately in these data centers, it says that probably the algorithm for computing the PR can potentially actually be different (presumably as a result of their update distribution mechanism.)

Maybe the Google brain will, like Colossus, "wake up" and become the global consciousness, hack into the military computers around the world on it's own initiative and black mail … oh forget it.