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The history of Google is easily explained as partly the history of automating search engine results. The unique technology and vision at the heart of the Google algorithm is called the PageRank algorithm. For almost a decade Yahoo was the company to beat as far as search engines. The basic problem is that Yahoo was 'manually' reviewing each site both labor intensive and subject to the reviewers tastes.

A method of 'reviewing' a web site without human intervention was needed in order to first render an objective opinion on what was a good site, one that the average user would want to visit and what was more commercial and less informative. Two Sanford Ph.D. candidates Michigan-born Larry Page and Russian Sergey Brin. Came up with an amazingly simple method for qualifying web pages.

One of HTML's key provisions was for a hypertext 'link' to other sites. By recording the links to other sites. While the spider ( the search engine parser that automatically reads your website ) was reading individual sites looking for words to index, it recorded the URL for the sites the author recommended.With each link from another site to yours, your 'pagerank' got another gold star. The site with the most gold stars for a given search topic got top position.

BTW Pagerank is named for Larry, but it does have a kind of nice semantic subconscious back link in there. Sergey was apparently intrigued by the scaling of the problem from around 10 million pages and 100 million links, during the early investigation to the billions of pages links we now catagorize today. Complex software often starts with relatively simple ideas.

So todays pagerank is only distantly related to the simple concept the company was founded on. There is an entire field of computing ( Search Engine Optimization ) or SEO that is entirely dedicated to uncovering all the nuances of the Google ranking algorithm. Getting to the top of the pile on Google is worth money... LOTS of money.

Google has an interest in keeping the most relevant pages near the top of their search pages, their rather lavish lifestyles depend on it. If people go elsewhere for their information... the ad revenues dry up pretty quickly. Ask Yahoo. The original concept was to look for the most 'authoritative' sites on the web. The change is now everyone is trying to be that Authority.

There are many obvious things that go into getting a high pagerank. One of them is age, not unlike society itself, age doesn't necessarily confer authority. But most of

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