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Google’s 200 Different Factors for Ranking Search Results

PageRank has been around since 1997, when it was developed by Larry Page at Stanford University. As we learned in class, PageRank is used by Google Search to determine the most valuable pages based on given search terms, and return links to those pages through the Google search results page. In 2000, Google provided a new feature on its toolbar where visitors to a page could see the PageRank score of the current page they were on. This toolbar and the fact that you could see the PageRank of your own website led users to drop many more (most of the time useless) links on their pages. This affected the search results and made this search algorithm less efficient.

Since then, Google has made the PageRank score private, and justifiably so. In this article, “Google’s 200 Top Ranking Factors: The Complete List,” we see the things that Google’s search engine looks for when searching for the best page to display to its users. In class, we learned about PageRank and how it is used to determine scores of a page, however, we didn’t exactly go into detail about how these scores are exactly computed. Some of the things Google considers are pretty obvious — having keywords be most frequent word in document, number of inbound links, number of comments, etc. There are also a few that made the list that may be a little bit surprising or less intuitive. For example, Google values a page higher if it contains more links to Wikipedia, more YouTube videos, or even the most contact information.

This shows that PageRank is much more complicated than the simplified nodes we have used to assign scores in class.

RIP Google PageRank score: A retrospective on how it ruined the web

 

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