Page Rank and Google

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Introduction
PageRank was proposed by Larry Page and Serge Brin, the founders of Google. [1] PageRank is a link analysis
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alogirthm used to determine the relative importance of a web page, thus a web page with a higher PageRank is considered to be more important and is more likey to be listed higher than a page with a lower PageRank.
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Earlier Search Engines
There were many search engines prior to Google. But unlike Google, most of them used simple web-crawling techniques like, inverted indexing and term frequency. Essentially an inverted index, is a data structure which points to each instance where the term occurs, making lookups relatvely effecient and easy.
When querying terms using inverted indexing, the search engine would locate on which web-pages those terms were found. Inverted indexing will rank the web-page based on how the term was being used. Thus a web-page with that said term being in the title or header, would be more relevant than a web-page with a high number of occurances of that term. Term frequency, was used more to reassure the relativeness of a web-page rather than to rank the pages itself.
As people began to fimilarise themselves with the internet and how the search engines were used, exploits were found. Particularly, how pages were being ranked. People found it easy to trick others into visting their websites by either inlcuding the term in the title or header or by increasing the amount of times that said term occurs in their web-page. For instance, people who sell cars could easily exploit the weaknesses
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of inverse indexing by adding the word ”cars” to their title and increasing the number of times the word appears in their normal text to fool the search engine into ranking their page higher, thu...

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... Taher H. Haveliwala, Topic-Sensitive PageRank,
Standford University
[3] Zolt an Gy ongyi, Hector Garcia-Molina and Jan Pedersen, Combating Web Spam with
TrustRank,
Stanford University, Pg 577-578
[4] Adam Bilter, What is PageRank?,
Retrieved on March 17, 2014 from http://checkpagerank.net/blog/pagerank/what-is-pagerank.php [5] Ian Rogers, IPR Computing Ltd., The Google PageRank Algorithm and How It Works,
Retrieved on March 20, 2014 from http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ chazelle/courses/BIB/pagerank.htm
[6] Jeffrey D. Ullman, PageRank
Chapter 5, Link Analysis Pg 161-173
[7] Web Master Resources and Seo Tips, Google - PageRank advantages and disadvantages
Retrieved on March 20, 2014 from http://web-master-seo.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-pagerank-advantages-and.html [8] Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer, Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of
Search Engine Rankings

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