Why Google Owns the Web
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Since its inception in 1998 the company has deposed former search industry giants like Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos. Google’s unparalleled success is not unwarranted. It’s primarily the result of a mathematical formula called PageRank. This formula has transformed the Internet into thriving market— one which Google dominants.
Like many Google technologies, PageRank is a unique approach to information handling and data retrieval on the Internet. Google describes this technology the following way:
“The heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web page developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.”
In other words, everything that Google does revolves around PageRank and the billions of dollars the formula generates for the company.
Despite sounding sophisticated because of the exponential revenue it creates, PageRank is a fairly straightforward concept. Most simply put, PageRank is a method of assessing the importance of a web page based upon its relationship to other web pages. To assess importance, each distinct page has a value assigned to it. Fascinatingly enough, PageRank values are an exceedingly accurate map of user behavior probability. Google’s founders have a unique insight into this phenomenon:
“PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a “random surfer” who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting “back” but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.”
But PageRank is not only an interesting behavioral phenomenon; it’s also a social phenomenon. It offers a completely objective measure of a web page’s importance, all of which is calculated mathematically with no human interference. That’s what I find so interesting about the whole concept of PageRank— it’s a way of predicting social behavior and human interaction using a mere mathematical formula. Only Google could pull off such a feat.
Source: http://www.lazworld.com/whitepapers/PageRank-Technologies.pdf