If facebook's "like" was to replace PageRank they would have to have buttons on a whole lot more pages (Google said a while back they consider one trillion URLs in their index). Especially sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist -- which seem unlikely to ever use facebook widgets.
Do you ever think "liking" could realistically replace Google's crawler approach?
"liking" is inherently biased. It is in no way an objective measurement of usefulness. Pages that contain negative content will never be "liked" even though they might be very useful or linked to a lot.
As an extreme example, say a mass-murderer becomes very famous. No one (except for a trolling few) will "like" a page giving information about him, like on wikipedia. But this page would be a lot more interesting than a sensationalist article describing him as the second and third coming of Satan, which would be "liked" a lot more, without really being more valuable.
If facebook's "like" was to replace PageRank they would have to have buttons on a whole lot more pages (Google said a while back they consider one trillion URLs in their index). Especially sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist -- which seem unlikely to ever use facebook widgets.
Do you ever think "liking" could realistically replace Google's crawler approach?