Google PR & Yandex TIC: Their Similarities, Differences & Mechanisms of Getting Their Values
- Published: 12 July 2007
In the 1990s, with its mushroom growth of the Internet in general and the Runet (the Russian segment of the Internet) in particular, there was a huge number of various counters, ratings, catalogs with popularity ranking. And it was fashionable to register no matter where and then to hang numerous multi-colored banners on your web pages. Meanwhile, only a few undertstood quickly that, firstly, there is no need to count the attendance by some few counters at the same time, and, secondly, it is just a bad form of web design – to make a web site looking like a bulletin board.
The aforesaid does not mean that I claim to the settled methods of web promotion and search engines optimization (SEO). I just pay attention to “the edge of reason” in all this. However, during the past years only 2 “giants” survived among the variety of ratings: Google with its PageRank and Yandex with its TIC (and the catalog based on it). Let’s see them in detail.
Yandex in more known in the Runet. Its “Thematic Index of Citing” (TIC), is used to rank search engine results and differs from the “index of citing” by that TIC defines a web site’s rank by the number of thematically close web pages that refer (cite) the given web site. Note that TIC is the rank indicator of the whole web site, not of its separate pages. Using TIC, Yandex also ranks websites in its own catalog. For web masters it is convinient that Yandex offers a banner (counter) to display the actual TIC value of a web site:
Google PageRank (PR), unlike Yandex TIC, is the indicator characterizing each web page from Google’s perspective. In general, it is calculated almost the same way: based on the number of other web pages referencing the given one. And such general words describe the algorithm in a number of Google’s official publications.
The problem is, Google does not offer any convinient tool or service to get PR values except its Google Toolbar – an addon for a browser. There is no any official PR banner/counter, so now we have luxuriant growth of third-party web sites offering such tools based on its own implementation of the PR algorithm. However, these third-party web sites cannot guarantee that their results of calculating PR will agree with the original Google PR! And Google itself does not disclose its algorithm in details, moreover – it periodically updates the algo! The only solution is to use Google’s native PR value…
And it can be obtained! 😊 Not as a graphic banner/counter but at least in a form of a HTTP text answer to the request like http://google.com/