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Blog Post 2

Joseph Zolik, jz565

Article Referenced: https://qz.com/1402011/google-at-20-early-images-hardly-show-how-much-its-changed/

 

The article discusses the evolution of Google’s search engine over its 20 years of business. The original method of search engine was called Backrub and it was two college students’ way of rudimental way to determine the importance of each webpage. However, it was PageRank that made them outpace competitors such as Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. PageRank, like we’ve learned in class, bases its ranking of webpages on how many other webpages link to it and those webpages importance. When a more important webpage (determined by PageRank) links to a lower ranked webpage, the lower ranked webpage will go up in importance or ranking.

 

Therefore, webpages that were featured more often or were linked to more often were thus ranked higher in Google’s search. Today, Google has changed its algorithm to factor in over 200 determinants for a page’s rank on the user’s screen. This is in no small part to the personalization of Google’s services for the user. While PageRank was programmed by humans, Google’s new algorithms BrainRank are based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. This ostensibly allows them to deliver increasingly personalized results that are more accurate for the user.

 

It’s interesting to see that even today PageRank serves as the foundation for Google’s search service. Although it factors in other determinants in showing the PageRank for the user such as location and search history, the order of those narrowed criteria are still determined by PageRank. It’s a fundamental algorithm that allows Google to deliver not only personalized results, but more seemingly higher quality results.

 

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