Google Rank Patent for Delegation Authority Factors

Delegated authority evaluation system (patent application)

The evaluation system is managed by a primary authority that designates one or more contributing authorities by delegating to each a specific quantity of authority.
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Each contributing authority, and optionally the primary authority itself, may evaluate one or more portions of content by associating a rating with each evaluated portion of content. A composite rating for a particular portion of content may then be determined based upon the ratings associated with the portion of content. Preferably, the ratings are combined in a manner that affords a higher priority to the ratings provided by contributing authorities to which a greater quantity of authority was delegated.

The Evolution of Google Ratings (Experts Delegating Authority)?

The important part of the patent is that this rating system involves experts on specific topics, who might delegate some of their authority to others when providing ratings.
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Maybe elements of this rating system might be incorporated into the social network that Google is said to be launching sometime next year.

Couldn't they also just tweak the pagerank passed to be somewhat more user-definable. I could to pass 40% of the pagerank to x link and split up the rest to all links. And adding it to be specifically targeted to keywords wouldn't be that hard. The bigger problem, I would think, is getting people to spend their time doing that. So somehow meta tools would be needed to make this practical. I am not sure how they would work but I could imagine some such system working pretty well.

There would obviously be all sorts of gaming risks that would have to be dealt with somehow.

Google does now provide search results enhanced by your social network (showing links they tweeted...). My guess is Google increases the rank of those pages - though maybe they leave the rank the same and just add a little note for you to see.