Make it a floating point number. So instead of me having PR 0, I'd have PR 0.00000001. Some of the people on this forum would get PR 3.2 instead of PR 3. That would have a really negative affect on SEO cause the two guys in the world who aren't obsessed by PR will be.

But if Google's stated goal is "To organize all the world's information" doesn't it make sense to start with their own house? And isn't the whole point of organizing something to make it more useful?

That might put a dent in link exchanges and attempts to hijack Google, or spamdex. "I won't trade with you! I said PR 4, you fool, not PR 3.7!" It would give more accurate feedback, and imagine where that could lead. A guy bought this SEO program that told him which blogs to spam, and then suddenly his sites fell out of the Google index. He asked the smart folks for help, then returned to his evil ways. But I'd hope if people spammed every forum in town and it didn't get them anywhere, they'd go do something else.

Dude, this is just ASKING for trouble...since what you're forgetting is the opposite side of the coin.

"I'm no longer a PR 4...I'm a PR 4.(something)!" The last thing big G needs to do is to make the toolbar PageRank any more 'accurate'. The best thing they can do is to restrict access to this type of information to site owners via Webmaster Tools. Site owners would know their own external PageRank, and no one else's.

That would be far more likely to get rid of PageRank Protritanopia than anything...keep it available, but conceal it.

So instead of me having PR 0, I'd have PR 0.00000001

It probably already is or even smaller

The Google internal one anyway

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one

taken from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine section 2.1.1 (bolding added)

Okay, this has nothing to do with links, but while the concept of adding up to 1, or to 100 %, makes sense, it's pretty expensive to work in decimals, especially as you add precision. And for billions of pages to all total 1.0, float and decimal types wouldn't be enough.

Any thoughts on how that's accomplished? Sorry, extremely geeky question, but now I'm curious. I know Google invented their own distributed file system, so I wouldn't be shocked if they created a programming language or runtime framework, and built their own primitive data types?