What something is about often is so implicit that it’s precisely the thing that’s not stated. And sometimes a page can’t even know what it’s about: the manual about O-ring maintenance couldn’t know that it would actually be about the Challenger disaster.

So, I wonder how a search engine like Google would do if, when assessing the relevance of a page, it counted the content of pages directly linking to it much higher than the content of the page itself. Aren’t those linking pages more likely to state explicitly what’s on the target page that warrants a link?

Maybe Google’s PageRank algorithm(s) already does that. Anyway, I bet a bunch of people have already studied this extensively and have pre-figured out why I’m wrong.

Categories: Uncategorized dw