There is some discussion at arXiv.org about CiteRank, using the Google PageRank algorithm to find or predict winners of the Nobel prize for physics.

blog: http://arxivblog.com/?p=1123
journal abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2640

/. covered this too, at
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/1531254