How Google works.

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  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
      CALIFORNIA; PALO Alto (Calif.); UNITED States
    • Subject Terms:
      GOOGLE Inc. GOOG; STANFORD University
    • Subject Terms:
      BRIN, Sergey, 1973-; PAGE, Larry, 1973-
    • Abstract:
      The article explains how Google search engine works. Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Mr Brin's and Mr Page's accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so using a mathematical recipe, or algorithm, called PageRank. This algorithm is at the heart of Google's success. PageRank works by analysing the structure of the web itself. Each of its billions of pages can link to other pages, and can also, in turn, be linked to. Mr Brin and Mr Page reasoned that if a page was linked to many other pages, it was likely to be important. Furthermore, if the pages that linked to a page were important, then that page was even more likely to be important. There is, of course, an inherent circularity to this formula--the importance of one page depends on the importance of pages that link to it, the importance of which depends in turn on the importance of pages that link to them. But using some mathematical tricks, this circularity can be resolved, and each page can be given a score that reflects its importance. Google actually uses sophisticated techniques from a branch of mathematics known as linear algebra to perform the calculation in a single step. Mr Page and Mr Brin made another important innovation early on. This was to consider the "anchor text"--the bit of text that is traditionally blue and underlined and forms a link from one page to another--as a part of the web page it referred to, as well as part of the page it was actually on. They reasoned that the anchor text served as an extremely succinct, if imprecise, summary of the page it referred to. This further helps to ensure that when searching for the name of a person or company, the appropriate website appears at the top of the list of results.