Important, to whom?

When you search with Google, you are requesting the list of most important Web pages on a topic, as ranked by Google. And you hope Google's ranking matches your criteria of what "importance" is in your personal context.

Clive Thompson, for Wired: Reputation Is Everything: Google isn't a search engine. Google is a reputation-manag[e]ment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas -- and what we want to know [is], what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling -- and, most of all, linking -- has transformed the Internet into a world where it's incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. ...