The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

clicking on a link in a search engine results page (SERP).

the main things that indicates a page’s perceived importance to a search engine’s ranking algorithm is the quantity and quality of references – or links – to that page from other web pages.

They surmised that these links could be used to build an index of all the content out there—one where the “best” page on a given topic was the one that had the most other pages linking to it.

“Kleinberg had this notion of authority, where your page can become good just by linking to the right pages,”

So the problem became finding the right data to determine whose comments were more trustworthy, or interesting, than others. Page realized that such data already existed and no one else was really using it. He asked Brin, “Why don’t we use the links on the web to do that?”

‘Wow, the big problem here is not annotation. We should now use it not just for ranking annotations, but for ranking searches.’”