Is PageRank a good determination of the quality of a page?

To examine the worth of PageRank, we need to first look at its premise, and how accurate it is. Basically PageRank says:

1. If a page links to another page, it is casting a vote, which indicates that the other page is good.
2. If lots of pages link to a page, then it has more votes and its worth should be higher.

The basic implication here is: People only link to pages they think are good.

It shouldn't be hard to convince you that this premise is wrong. A few of the reasons people link to pages other than ones they think are good are:

1) Reciprocal links ? "Link to me and I'll link to you."
2) Link Requirements ? "Using our script requires you to put a link to our page." or "We'll give you an award solely because you link to our page."
3) Friends and Family ? "This is my friend Pete?s site.? or "My mum?s site is here, my dad's site is here. My dog's site is here."
4) Free Page Add-ons ? "This counter was provided by www.linktocountersite.com."

Furthermore, anybody who has a top-ranking site will tell you that it tends to get links from new sites. This is not necessarily because it's good (although they generally are). Assume a Webmaster is setting up a new site and they are looking for some outbound links. Nowadays, one of the first things they do is a Google search for similar sites. The links they end up with may not necessarily be the best sites, but merely the easiest ones to find. If PageRank influences rankings, and if they subsequently link to those pages ? the new Webmaster will be adding to the inaccuracies in the judging of the quality of a page. The same is true when these new Webmasters use the Google Toolbar PageRank indicator to choose whom to link to.

To put this another way: