brains function design

  Surfing the web is no different than driving a car. As you navigate the busy streets, you occasionally look at your dashboard to compare what is going on outside of the car with what your GPS, for example, might be offering (usually the wrong directions). When surfing the web, you should have installed the very handy Google Toolbar (download it). The toolbar is compatible with Mac and Windows, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox so there are no excuses for not having it. 

One of the features that I use when either performing a search engine analysis on a site or to ensure that the sites I am perusing are popular is to take a look at the PageRank indicator along my Google toolbar. 

The PageRank is a number value from 0 to 10 that expresses the old adage “it’s not who you know but who knows you.” Sites like Amazon and YouTube have a high PageRank of 9 out of 10. This is because they are so popular and linked to by many other websites.

As a web surfer, you can use PageRank to help you find sites that are popular especially when surfing in a realm you are not too familiar with. For example, suppose you were researching MySpace layouts. You would go to Google and search for “myspace layouts” and you’d get 40 million results. Though you will likely not go past the first page of results, you may not be able to qualify one site from another. That’s where looking at the PageRank for each site will help you determine popularity or relative permanence. A site with a PageRank of 3 means that the site’s been around for a number of years. A higher PageRank would indicate global popularity.

Happy surfing!

Aloha,
Richard