Chapter 11: Web Searches with PageRank
Searching the web is one of the first things we learn to do on the internet. The purpose, simply, is to find information of a topic of interest, but how does Google, or other search engines, take the words we search and effectively return what we want? This is the question we aim to answer in this chapter.
More specifically, this chapter discusses web searches from both a mathematical and practical perspective. We will first build the mathematical setting for common methods for web searches. We'll then look more deeply at Google's PageRank method and the linear algebra required. We'll then construct an implementation of PageRank that combines this linear algebra with the probabilistic aspects of PageRank we discussed in Chapter 5, Elements of Discrete Probability.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- The development of search engines over time
- How Google's PageRank algorithm works
- Implementing...
