PageRank Beyond the Web
PageRank is an algorithm developed by Google incorporating a system of scores that use the link structure of the web to determine which pages are important given a user query. However, as this article emphasizes, PageRank is now used in applications far beyond its origins in Google’s web search. Its applications range from ordering genes related to a microarray experiment or to a disease to ranking football teams by constructing “winner” networks based on the number of goals each team won by.
More PageRank applications include assessment of hydrogen bond potential of a solvent by using the algorithm to assess the change in a network of molecules linked by hydrogen bonds among water molecules. Given the output of a molecular dynamics simulation that provides geometric locations for a solute in water, a graph is constructed with edges between water molecules if they have a potential hydrogen bond to a solute molecule. The network is inspected based on PageRank values with and without a solute to find structural differences and analyze the valence of the molecule. Some of the most interesting applications of PageRank actually arise when it is used to study the variety of network data in biology and bioinformatics. Such applications range from Finding Correlated Genes to ProteinRank, which aims to find proteins that may share human-curated functional annotations about what the proteins themselves do. PageRank has proven to be an extremely useful algorithm for uses far beyond its original intended use case.
https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dgleich/publications/Gleich%202015%20-%20prbeyond.pdf