Several people have now become involved in the OpenRank project - an attempt to re-build a large, representative index of the www for the purposes of obtaining information independent from the major commercial search engines. This data will most likely be used to help understand how and why the search engines rank as they do and allow SEO/SEMs to have a better understanding of the link structure of the world wide web.

Todd Malicoat from WeBuildPages has initiated a new website for the project which already has some small discussion going on. Our first priorities will be to evaluate the cost and potential profit model in order to determine feasability. Basically, we need to know how much it costs to host 2 billion indexed pages and their corresponding link popularity data.

With a little luck and a lot of time invested, we're hoping to replace the aging, inaccurate measurement of PageRank and replace it with true measurements of global and local link popularity on the web.