PageRank

Today I stumbled upon Prase, a new Page Ranking search engine, and started experimenting with it. Soon I discovered that I need to know the basics of Page Ranking in order to understand how to make the most out of it - so I entered the word PageRank into QT/Search to collect some chunks:

About Prase
http://www. hawaiistreets. com/seoblog/seoblog. php?itemid=547
Prase stands for PageRank Assisted Search Engine. As of today, I think Prase could be the best link-building tool there is. First of all, it's free and second of all, it lacks the spammy downloads other companies offer you. I've been playing around with Prase for a few minutes this morning and am already taken in by features it has to offer.
1. Search multiple databases by keywords Prase gives you the ability to select from Google and/or Yahoo! and/or MSN as database providers. Simply enter a keyword you associate with a perfect link partner and Prase will return you the results.
2. Sort by PageRank Before you begin a search, you have an option of choosing a PageRank range. This is especially useful if you are trying to either gain backlinks from a high PR site or bypass those sites all together.
When you search, results are sorted for you from highest PR to the lowest.
Start the search anywhere you want You can tell Prase where to begin displaying search results. A useful feature again if you are trying to avoid top sites and target medium or lower end sites. Prase is going on to my del. icio. us list for great service and usability. As an SEO, I am very impressed with service it offers putting to shame companies that try to sell you similar software.

http://www. geekvillage. com/forums/showthread. php?s=e542a4abe1c1e7b25a40743f60c6373d&postid=163100#post163100
There have been other Page Rank search engines, but this one is a bit different in the way it does things.
This search engine would mainly be of interest to people who want to see sites listed according to PageRank. That would include people interested in exchanging links with sites based on their PageRank.
Great they have a higher PageRank, but you are higher in the search results. Since PRASE has results listed by Page Rank, the best site for the searched term isn't always shown at or near the top. That isn't to imply that what is always shown first in the search results is always the best when they aren't arrange by PageRank. With PRASE it is easy to see that the sites with the highest PageRank often aren't the ones that are first in the natural results. The results are sorted three times by PRASE First they are sorted by search engine. Then they are sorted according to PageRank. Then they are finalized by listing them in decending order based on their search engine ranking.
If there is a tie in search engine ranking, the listing is done based upon search engine market share with Google first, Yahoo second and then MSN. The main purpose of PRASE is to search based upon PageRank and to easily show that. It has an added feature that allows you to search for sites within a certain range. The default is between 0 and 9.

About PageRank
1. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/PageRank
PageRank, sometimes abbreviated to PR, is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine originally developed by Larry Page (thus the play on the words PageRank). Its properties are much discussed by search engine optimization (SEO) experts. The PageRank system is used by the popular search engine Google to help determine a page's relevance or importance. It was developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University in 1998.
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote.
A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked by many pages with high rank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support of this specific page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_search
Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive figure of merit for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank thus derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists.
Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title tags, H1 heading tags and image alt attributes) and "off page" factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page," in particular the title tag and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. In this way virtual communities of webpages are found.

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
sergey, page}@cs.stanford.edu
Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
PageRank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar. google. com/).
PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it’s written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link!
The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from 0 to 10.
In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).