PageRank

term

web dev

Google's ranking idea: score a page by who links to it, weighting links from well-linked pages more heavily.

It measures something a page's own author does not control, which is why it resisted the keyword-stuffing that was defeating the search engines of the mid-1990s. Begun as a Stanford project called BackRub in January 1996. Page and Brin offered it to AltaVista for a million dollars in 1998 and were turned down.

Also known as: page rank, backrub

Sources

  • Page and Brin, 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine' (1998)
  • EBSCO Research Starters: Google is founded

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