Google PageRank I
In the late 1990s, there were many search engines on the internet, including Yahoo, Altavista, and Ask Jeeves, but when Google emerged in the early 2000s, it quickly supplanted all of those as the most popular search engine and has remained popular for nearly 20 years, in large part because its results were of such high quality that users flocked to the website. Google used a new approach to web searches that generated very good results.
Developed by Stanford University students, and later Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (along with researchers Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd) in 1996, the algorithm used was called PageRank. Google's primary searching algorithms have certainly progressed from this since 1996 but it remains a key part of their approach.
The key idea of PageRank is to not merely to look for websites that match the user's search terms most closely like most other search tools at the time but to weight the matches by the...
