Aritcles

Google's PageRank

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

The reason for this "

PageRank Explained

" paper
Not long ago, there was just one well-known PageRank Explained paper, to which most interested people referred when trying to understand the way that PageRank works. In fact, I used it myself. But when I was writing the PageRank Calculator, I realized that the original paper was misleading in the way that the calculations were done. It uses its own form of PageRank, which the author calls "mini-rank". Mini-rank changes Google's PageRank equation for no apparent reason, making the results of the calculations very misleading.

Even though the author abandoned mini-rank as a result of this and another paper, the original, unchanged paper is still available on the web. So if you come across a PageRank Explained paper that uses "mini-rank", it has been superceded and is best ignored.