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The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
One of the early versions of BackRub had simply counted the incoming links, but Page and Brin quickly realized that it wasn’t merely the number of links that made things relevant. Just as important was who was doing the linking.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had figured out how to mine that knowledge before the information retrieval establishment and commercial search engines even realized that it existed.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The PageRank score would be combined with a number of more traditional information retrieval techniques, such as comparing the keyword to text on the page and determining relevance by examining factors such as frequency, font size, capitalization, and position of the keyword.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
PageRank. It made BackRub much more useful than the results you’d get from the commercial search engines.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Important pages tended to link to important pages. We convert the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the Page Ranks of all the web pages, and billions of terms, which are all the links.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Larry Page’s PageRank was powerful because it cleverly analyzed those links and assigned a number to them, a metric on a scale of 1 to 10, that allowed you to see the page’s prominence in comparison to every other page on the web.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
This is how I put it in the February 22, 1999, issue of Newsweek: “Google, the Net’s hottest search engine, draws on feedback from the web itself to deliver more relevant results to customer queries.”