A Brief Description of Google PageRank

• Mar. 19, 2003

Over the past few months, there has been much debate in the search engine world over Google and it’s dominance in the search engine market.  Sure it might not be as popular as MSN or Yahoo! but in terms of pure relevant search, it is as big as they get.  Google claims to currently have 3,083,324,652 pages in their index, far larger than their nearest competitor (size wise) Fast/Alltheweb, who claim to have 2,142,833,819 in their index.

 

Google also possesses something which many search engines try hard to duplicate, that is the ability to provide relevant results in a search query.  Now, if you have used search engines before, as I’m sure most of you have, you know that on many engines, your searches are often fruitless and time consuming.  However, if you go to Google, there’s a really good chance that what you searched for will actually be displayed in the search results.  How novel is that?  Actually getting what you searched for.

 

I guess you could equate it to buying a new suit.  You go to the local mass marketed clothing store and although they have the right color, they don’t have the right size, or the right style, or they have all that but it costs too much.  Then you go to the local suit warehouse and voila! They have exactly what you want at the price you’re willing to pay.

 

So the next logical question is how does Google do this?  With all the spam out there and the millions of pages of useless information (as I’m sure you’ve found countless times) how does Google determine what is useful to you based on your search term?

 

Well there are a variety of criteria, but I’m only going to focus on one here – the Google PageRank.

 

Googling PageRank Part 2