pagerank for my Obsidian notes

Brian Hicks, January 17, 2023

I recently learned a little more about how the Pagerank algorithm works. I thought it was cool, and it made me wonder what the ranks for my Obsidian vault looked like, so I built a little tool. It's fairly simple: it just parses [[links]] out of the vault with a regex and then uses the simple-pagerank crate for Rust to calculate the ranking.

For my vault, the most centrally connected node is my employer. It's the top node by quite a lot (with a score of 4.9), followed by the town where I live (2.0), then members of my family (around 2) and notes on projects I'm doing and tools I use (around 1.) This makes a lot of sense to me; I primarily use Obsidian as a way to keep a work log and write about things related to that, as I wrote about previously.

If you'd like to try this for yourself, you can get the code at bytes.zone/brian/obsidian-pagerank, although you'll need to have either Nix or Rust installed in advance. If you decide to try it, let me know if you find anything interesting!