For better or worse, pagerank destroyed the value of inbound links and by extension it killed the web. Now Google, not links determine how your page is found and while I'm sure links still have some value that is only one of a very large number of inputs. I believe it is impossible to come up with some way of ranking web results that does not in the end lead to a destruction of the metric that one uses to rank with, if the metric initially gives great results. Spammers will figure it out and will drown out the signal with noise.