In an interview (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Feb05/apostolos.html) by Mike Grehan, Ask Jeeves's Apostolos says that Google no longer uses PageRank.

An amazing insight. Thanks Barry for pushing me in the direction of this and thanks Mike for undertaking the interview.

Last and by no means least thank you to the guys at Ask! A great read

That is indeed a great interview, but the take on google not using PageRank is not quite spot on I don't believe:

There is some debate about this. I think both of them were independently discovered. Has PageRank influenced Google? The answer is: later, yes. Have they implemented PageRank? The answer is no.

Mike:

Well that's very interesting that you mention that. Because I was going to ask you. In 1998 both PageRank and Kleinberg's work were both pretty much advanced because search on the web was in its infancy then.

But, it's 2005 now, so things have changed. And I wanted to ask you about how important you think PageRank is in the work that goes on over at Google?

Apostolos:

The importance has diminished because PageRank is just one piece of the ranking algorithm over there. The ranking algorithm is so much more complex now. And PageRank is just used when they want to break ties.

Which to me are conflicting answers are best, and my take from the quote is just what the majority of the SEO community believes - PageRank is used but its not a very important part of the algo.

It's hard to take them seriously on SE technology. They just use that to collect the content to sell ads. It takes about 4 hours of scrolling, just to bypass the "sponsored listings".