[ssn]

But does it work in practice? It doesn't seem to. PageRank is mostly a marketing tool.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hits-on...

"The fact that in-degree features outperform PageRank under all measures is quite surprising. A possible explanation is that link-spammers have been targeting the published PageRank algorithm for many years, and that this has led to anomalies in the web graph that affect PageRank."

[srean]

Well, if you are looking for a measure that is the easiest to game, abuse and spam, you cant go wrong with your pagerank killer: in-degree.

It works less well than it used to, but its never used in isolation. Used in isolation its a pretty good porn detector.