Other uses of PageRank

A version of PageRank has recently been proposed as a replacement for the traditional ISI impact factor. Instead of merely counting citations of a journal, the "quality" of a citation is determined in a PageRank fashion.

A Web crawler may use PageRank as one of a number of importance metrics it uses to determine which URL to visit next during a crawl of the web. One of the early working papers which was used in the creation of Google is Efficient crawling through URL ordering, which discusses the use of a number of different importance metrics to determine how deeply, and how much of a site Google will crawl. PageRank is presented as one of a number of these importance metrics, though there are others listed such as the number of inbound and outbound links for a URL, and the distance from the root directory on a site to the URL.