Search Beyond Google outlines newer search engines' challenges to Google and they all seem to be based upon different approaches from Pagerank.

Was Pagerank what really made Google or was it the fact that they had elegant usability and design, weren't a 'big bad company' and were perceived to be cool for the people that matter when building a tech company - the techies, the early adopters who are the biggest users and potential evangelists?

Pagerank is arguably obsolete at this point, as weblogs and trackback and Tripadvisor.com demonstrate.

Surely the trophy collection of PhDs that work at Google are better used to optimize Adwords or tackle the physics of cooling fans in the server farms than all be tweaking Pagerank?

Is search a software problem or is Google an advertising company with great hardware hosting skills, that pretends to be focused on the arcana of search algorithms because it sounds cool if your PR needs to focus on what's hip in the tech world?