A Survey of Google’s PageRank
Within the past few years, Google has become the far most utilized search engine worldwide. A decisive factor therefore was, besides high performance and ease of use, the superior quality of search results compared to other search engines. This quality of search results is substantially based on PageRank, a sophisticated method to rank web documents.
The aim of these pages is to provide a broad survey of all aspects of PageRank. The contents of these pages primarily rest upon papers by Google founders Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin from their time as graduate students at Stanford University.
It is often argued that, especially considering the dynamic of the internet, too much time has passed since the scientific work on PageRank, as that it still could be the basis for the ranking methods of the Google search engine. There is no doubt that within the past years most likely many changes, adjustments and modifications regarding the ranking methods of Google have taken place, but PageRank was absolutely crucial for Google’s success, so that at least the fundamental concept behind PageRank should still be constitutive. Read the rest of this entry »