Page Rankings: What do they teach us?

Faina Linkov, PhDRonald LaPorte, PhD

And the Global Health Network Supercourse projectUniversity of Pittsburgh

Google’s description of page rank

…PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In

essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But,

Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes

the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages

"important…"

• All search engines assign a value to your site based on inbound links

• Google calls this relevancy factor “Page Rank” (PR) - synonymous with popularity ranking

• An inbound link is a vote for your page

• An outbound link is a vote for the page you’re linking to

Understanding Page Rank

• A page is assigned PR as soon as it’s indexed

• The page receiving the most inbound links gets the highest page rank

• You can pass PR around to pages on your site

Understanding Page Rank

• Your popularity is not determined by the sites you link to

• Your outbound links affect the popularity of the sites you’re linking to

• Internal links and inbound links have the most impact on your popularity

• Outbound links help identify you with a hub

Outbound Links

Page Rankings and the Supercourse

Teacher in Mexico

Teacher in Santo

Domingo

Teacher in Havana

Teacher in Pittsburgh

Teacher in San Francisco

Supercourse Model: lecture sharing

Teacher in Bolivia

Current Status

40000 participants

(15 Nobel Prize winners)

151 countries

Over 2800 lectures

A Model for Developing and Prescribing

Assistive Technology Devices

Mary Ellen Buning, PhD, OTR/L, Mary Ellen Buning, PhD, OTR/L, ATPATP

Jue Wang, PhDJue Wang, PhD

University of PittsburghUniversity of Pittsburgh

Cardiovascular Epidemiology:

Definitions

Historical Perspectives and Assessing Risk of CVD

Recent trends and population differences in CHD and CHD risk

factors

Nathan Wong

Topic – Google PPT. lecture ranking for the SupercourseAmebiasis - 2(English) 3 (Spanish)

Communicable Disease and disasters - 3/372Cardiovascular epidemiology - 1&2/9730

Diabetes epidemiology - 3/13,000Evidenced based public health - 1/158

Global Health - 1&2/3,820,000Indian Health - 1&2/56,000

Infectious disease epidemiology - 1/21,000Islamic/Arab health - 2/537

Information on the Web - 1/78Meta Analysis - 6/116,000

Occupation Cancer - 3/18,000Pakistani Health - 6&7/18,500

Pitt.edu - 2/2,400,000Primordial Prevention - 1/126

Russian health - 2&3/19,000Tsunami - 11/31,000

Health (this is a search on the whole web for the term "health"  (985,000,000 pages)

         NIH =          3         WHO =      40         CDC =     220          PAHO=  224

 

 Global health (328,000,000 pages)

US AID                3Gates                    4Supercourse         8CDC                   12WHO                  67NIH                     70PAHO              >300

  

 Page Rankings within  NIH search term, overall , and then only for the Institutes

                                   All                      Only Institutes

NLM                             3                                1NCCAM                      13                                 2NIMH                          12                                 3NHLBI                         19                                 4CIT                              27                                 5CSR                             29                                 6NIAID                          30                               7NEI                              36                                 8NICHD                        42                                 9

NIAMS                        48                                 10NIDA                           56                                 11NIA                             59                                 12NIDDK                        62                                 13NINDS                         66                                 14NIAAA                        69                                 15CC                              73                                 16NIEHS                        75                                 17 NIDCD                       82                                 18NCRR                         133                                19NINR                          205                                20NIBIB                          221                               21NCI                              236                               22FIC                             >300                             23NIGRI                         >300                              24NIGMS                       >300                              25NCMHD                      >300                             26

 

Conclusions

• Page ranking is an important tool helping to assess the popularity and the quality of the website

• Supercourse lectures are scored very highly by Google rankings

• We need to explore how page rankings can influence information dissemination in the US and worldwide