An Analysis of PageRank
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-google-pagerank-1616795
This article discusses some of the history of PageRank and explains how it works. It also mentions how some websites will put hidden text on a page, so Google will see the text that makes a page more valuable, which would artificially increase its PageRank. This article also discusses link farming, the act of making pages that link to unrelated pages to increase the PageRank of the pages, but many modern search and PageRank algorithms have tried to eliminate adapt their calculations to not include these link farms.
We talked about how the simple PageRank algorithm works in class, with pages that have more relevant outgoing links and more relevant incoming links will have higher scores and PageRank. This is interesting because it accounts for the strength of the pages that link to any cite, and the cites it links to, which leads to an algorithm that becomes more accurate after each iteration. While there are many minor tweaks that could be done to improve it, (like not accounting for link farms or hidden text) PageRank is a generally good algorithm, and Google has used it well and made a lot of improvements to it over time.