It turns out that the exception you referred to (storing information as a joke) is rare compared to the cases where people keep information (ie: address book contact) on businesses they want to maintain an ongoing relationship with. Any popularity algorithm, PageRank included, has noise to the signal. If Site A said “Site B is the worst designed site” yet linked to it, Site B would increase in rank on Google. However, since people generally link for the right reasons, PageRank works. Similarly, grayboxx’s PreferenceScoring, which works on various kinds of user data (tagged photos are actually a small fraction of our engine data), generally correlates with both critic’s picks and user rankings in the few categories that users and critics get around to ranking. We then provide ranked results to about 2,500 categories uniquely. Our beta will be available in the winter, for all to try.

Best,
Bob Chandra
grayboxx