Except that they're not in PageRank order, are they? Here are the PageRanks of the first 20 sites listed:

10 Yahoo!
9 Google
10 Microsoft
10 Adobe
9 Altavista
9 Excite
? Amazon (it redirects)
9 CNN
9 Lycos
9 Infoseek
9 Mapquest
9 Netscape
10 Real.com
9 nytimes.com
9 Winzip
10 Adobe (Acrobat download)
7 WebCrawler
? Hotmail
7 Hotbot
9 IBM.com

Edited by author 11-12-2002 02:09 PM
Dave Faris (/m10) asked: Who the heck is linking to yahoo and google and the CDC?

You just linked to Google. So did Cory's original post. There are tons of links to Google searches or Yahoo news items, which boost the ranking of the homepages. The CDC must have something that medical pages like to link.

Merry makes an excellent point in /m7.

Re /m14 -- this search finds links beginning with "http". I would bet that the majority of hrefs are relative.

Got me curious enough to try ftp, https, mailto, and gopher.

I have a problem with this... Don't you think there are more than 257,000,000 pages in Google. The front page says over 3 billion... Of course some aren't web pages, but .25 billion is a small portion of this. What's the deal?

pbx (/m1) asked rehtorically why is Adobe there? His
answer looks correct if you search for "click here" (which
I did and noticed the results about a year ago).

It's interesting that:

http://www

brings up a significantly different list.

Edited by author 11-11-2002 08:37 PM
<There's something really cool about that list -- the Internet is more about finding stuff than it is about stuff itself, it seems.>

Isn't stuff about finding stuff stuff?

You're right. http://www.google.com/technology/index.html ... so now I gotta ask... who the heck is linking to yahoo and google and the CDC? (I think I'm pretty much willing to blame it all on metafilter.)

I thought Pagerank was a measure of the number and quality of links to a page, and was one factor used to order the results returned for a search; it has nothing directly to do with how often something is searched for.

Edited by author 11-11-2002 06:41 PM
I'm confused. Pagerank is based on successful searches, isn't it? Who would search for yahoo or google? I also wonder why EPA, World Bank, The UN, and the White House would be so popular (and, again, why anyone would need to search for whitehouse.gov). More scary is why people are so interested in the Center for Disease Control, the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization websites.

"The Internet is more about finding stuff than it is about stuff itself, it seems." No - it's that the stuff is relatively decentralized, the finding is relatively centralized ("googling" is a common verb now), so naturally individual sites of the latter will rank higher.

I was going through the list, trying to find the first independent content site to show up, and I see how stuff works and the onion up pretty high in the first page of results, but holy cow, Blogger.com shows up in the second page of results, down near the end. It's in the top 200 most popular links online, according to Google.

Here's the top 1000 results:
google1k.txt

I can hear Fred yelling "I told you so!" already...

His theory about domain names not mattering anymore may have more weight than I initially gave it.

I'm suprised Altavista/Lycos/Excite are up there..haven't used any of them this millenium.
Good point on the Adobe placement.

Edited by author 11-11-2002 02:58 PM
How did IBM end up number 17? I've never even seen their site.

Why do you think Adobe's where it is in that list? "Click here to download Acrobat Reader"?