Sounds like Google's toolbar pagerank, which was a neat way of seeing the very generic "relevance" score Google assigned to a page.

Then Search Engine Optimization really started catching ground, and some SEO's would obsess about that number, going through all kinds of work to manage that number, and basing business decisions (such as: should we link to this site? should we request a link from that site?) far too heavily on that number, as opposed to the actual business relevance of what they were doing, and as opposed to whether it would be a useful result for their own visitors (or those of the other site).