PageRank – What Is It?

PageRank is the name of an algorithm used for analysing links. It aims to represent the relative import of each document within a set of hyperlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, by assigning a value to each one. Any collection of reciprocally linked, quoted and referenced, objects can be subject to the algorithm. Google uses it as the basis for all of their search tools; however it is only part of what ranks the search results of the Google search engine.

The part owner of Google Larry Page created PageRank at Stanford University in 1998, and its name is derived from his. The process for the algorithm was patented, and the name is a trademark of Google. Because the patent is actually assigned to Stanford University, Google had to exchange 1.8 million of its shares for the exclusive license rights.

A web page gets an importance assigned to it by the algorithm, a rank value, which is determined by taking into account all the rank values of the pages that refer to it. Therefore, if a page is linked to by a lot of highly ranked paged, the PageRank of the page itself will be high. By representing the likelihood of a person landing on a given page by clicking randomly on links, the algorithm gives a probability distribution of the importance of web pages.

There are problems with this process concerning its being manipulated, and this has drawn much academic attention throughout PageRank’s lifespan. Ways of finding and excluding pages from the process who’s PageRanks are increased artificially have been the focus of intense research. There have been cases where companies sell to webmasters links with high ranks. This has been publicly condemned by Google, who warns that such dishonest attempts to increase a pages rank will result in the relevant pages being ignored from the PageRank process.

Other areas of thought and analysis have benefited from PageRank, some of which are ecology, ranking the importance of certain animals to the flourishing of an environment; and such computational linguistics issues as word sense disambiguation. Although it was only developed a few decades ago, PageRank’s relevance to our modes of analysis in is growing.

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