Wills, R.S.: Google's PageRank : the math behind the search engine (2006)
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- Abstract
- Approximately 91 million American adults use the Internet on a typical day The number-one Internet activity is reading and writing e-mail. Search engine use is next in line and continues to increase in popularity. In fact, survey findings indicate that nearly 60 million American adults use search engines on a given day. Even though there are many Internet search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN receive over 81% of all search requests. Despite claims that the quality of search provided by Yahoo! and MSN now equals that of Google, Google continues to thrive as the search engine of choice, receiving over 46% of all search requests, nearly double the volume of Yahoo! and over four times that of MSN. I use Google's search engine on a daily basis and rarely request information from other search engines. One day, I decided to visit the homepages of Google. Yahoo!, and MSN to compare the quality of search results. Coffee was on my mind that day, so I entered the simple query "coffee" in the search box at each homepage. Table 1 shows the top ten (unsponsored) results returned by each search engine. Although ordered differently, two webpages, www.peets.com and www.coffeegeek.com, appear in all three top ten lists. In addition, each pairing of top ten lists has two additional results in common. Depending on the information I hoped to obtain about coffee by using the search engines, I could argue that any one of the three returned better results: however, I was not looking for a particular webpage, so all three listings of search results seemed of equal quality. Thus, I plan to continue using Google. My decision is indicative of the problem Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engine companies face in the quest to obtain a larger percentage of Internet search volume. Search engine users are loyal to one or a few search engines and are generally happy with search results. Thus, as long as Google continues to provide results deemed high in quality, Google likely will remain the top search engine. But what set Google apart from its competitors in the first place? The answer is PageRank. In this article I explain this simple mathematical algorithm that revolutionized Web search.
