| Hacker News starts to severely rate-limit replies in deeply nested threads so if you want to continue discussing this you can email me (email in profile). In regards to the question, the latter. The source corresponds roughly to the E vector of the pagerank whitepaper. It's a set of websites that's axiomatically good. The pagerank paper suggested the Netscape home page and John McCarthy's homepage as examples, or alternatively making every website a source, although the last option is more prone to abuse. The sink is harder to find a good analogy for. I think a reasonable choice would be to add a new node to the graph representing the sink, and then connect every website via a directed resistor. Then websites could be ranked by how much current flows through the resistor to the sink. Edit: By the way, upon thinking about this more, I've just realized that I'm not sure about the exact mechanism by which link farms boost pagerank. As far as I can tell there are two possibilities: A. The original "stuck in a loop" explanation, by which you can illegitimately magnify legitimately earned rank. B. With the every-page-as-source strategy, you can boost the rank of a website by creating a new website and linking to it, even if nothing links to the new website. Then the other extra links in the link farm just exist to avoid detection of this sort of thing. So you are illegitimately creating rank from scratch, rather than magnifying existing rank. Admittedly the electrical circuit thing only addresses mechanism A. Mechanism B can be addressed by being more discriminating about which websites are in the source. That applies whether you use pagerank or the electrical thing. |