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If you want to understand PageRank - really, really understand it - a new paper from David Austin will help you do just that. The trouble is, you'll need to be comfortable with some fairly high-level math in order to get through the paper - it's actually being featured by the American Mathematical Society.

Hitwise's Bill Tancer conducted a detailed analysis of "Google properties and how they rank amongst themselves in market share of visits," and while the results aren't necessarily shocking, they are interesting. Google's main search engine is the far-and-away leader of the pack, with a 78.42% share.

No one in the public sphere knows much about the Google algorithm, and the company undoubtedly plans to keep things that way. SEO expert Rand Fishkin made an educated guess, though, and attempted "to write out a rough outline of what the formula might look like."

Does Google have a lie detector in the works? Probably not, but a comment from CEO Eric Schmidt definitely turned a few heads. As a Reuters article stated, "he predicted that truth predictor' software would, within five years, hold politicians to account.'"

Website design is as much an art as a science. Still, some there are some guiding principles that will, in just about every case, make for a better site. Herman Drost has compiled a list of 16 of these elements.

A Google search can be a good barometer of how pervasive some stereotypes are in the world. If a search spider could sum up a nationality, a race, a religion in a few words, what would it say? What are Americans known for? What are the Europeans like?

Thursday, Standard & Poor's dropped its credit ratings for General Motors and Ford to "junk" status.

SupportSoft today announced the results of a national survey conducted among IT management in which 66% believed that they will incur more end-user calls for support when deploying SP2, Microsoft's most recent major upgrade to Windows XP with significant new security features.