Few days after the launch of the new Google checksum algorithm, is this new checksum already cracked ?

As far as we know, it does not seem to be the case yet, but some people are hardly working on cracking it again in order to update their tools. According to Nick Stallman comment on our previous article "I'll start cracking it again", PRGooglebar is already working on it. Nick Stallman is the admin of the PRGoogleBar project, a modification of the extension for Mozilla and Firefox, which adds Pagerank to the Googlebar of Mozdev.

I also use Firefox and I do support it (if you don't already use it you should at least try it...), but I do not support any project based on a crack.

Will they succeed ?

As they have already done it and as the new checksum algorithm is similar to the old one, they will probably succeed. But nobody knows how long this crack will last. Users of unofficial PR toolbars and online tools that display PageRank with a craked algorithm shoud be aware that at any time, Google can easily turn their tools obsolete.

This is the reason why we chose to base our PageRank and Backlinks Analyzer software PR Weaver on the Google toolbar and not on cracked versions of the algorithm.

How Google can avoid such cracks?

Until now Google's checksum algorithm is only based on one factor: the URL. Once the algorithm is cracked, it is easy to get the PageRank from a URL.

Now, imagine if Google changes the algorithm to base it on two factors (the URL and the unique ID of the user's computer for example), what would happen? Everybody would have a different checksum for the same URL, so all cracked and server solutions would instantly be useless with no hope to get back in the game.