Google PageRank II
In this section, we will continue learning about Google's PageRank algorithm, which we started to look at in Chapter 5, Elements in Discrete Probability. As we discussed in that chapter, two students at Stanford University and later founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with some researchers at Stanford, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd, tapped into some existing academic literature on information retrieval in linked documents and merged several innovations to adapt the ideas for use in web searches.
The algorithm they developed, PageRank, was so effective that Google soon became totally dominant in the field of search engines in the late 1990s to early 2000s. This innovative PageRank algorithm still forms a part of Google's searching methods, although their methods have, of course, progressed significantly in the past 20 years by implementing information from user histories, user location, and the like in determining which websites...