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Google Page rank

Google, unlike so many other search engines that you can find on the web, does not sell search page listings according to bids in a search category. Thus page ranking can not be bought at any price from Google. Instead they use what is called Google Page Rank which is a process through which relevant search results are placed on Google's search return according to quality of the site. Page rank is at the heart of the Google network's software and was developed by Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Although Google has numerous engineers working for them to improve and update every aspect of the Google network every day, the page rank software remains central to many of the web search tools that Google deploys on their sites today, and for good reason.

"Pagerank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value."
2007 Author's name not given, Our Search: Google Technology, retrieved 12-19-2007, retrieved from http://www.google.com/technolo gy/

What the Pagerank software does is it examines the links from one site to other sites. Each link to a page from another web page is counted as a vote for that particular page by the referring site. The rank of the referring website is also factored into the importance and weight of the "vote" that the page is casting for the referred to page. The equation that I found was:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.
2007 Cravin, Phil, Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it,webworkshop.net, retrieved from http://www.webworkshop.net/pag erank.html , retrieved on December 23, 2007

They go beyond just counting the sheer number of votes from one site to another. Google Pagerank then seeks relevance to the specific search term and searches for keywords within the specific page. It discards any links that are from known link farms from the number of votes cast for a site It also rates the quality of the content on the page. Pagerank then seeks meta tags on a site to categorize and index the sites category and usefulness.

Unlike many search engines there is no way to buy your way up the rankings by bidding your listings. Google Pagerank is a truly democratic system and is influenced only by the content and the links that are on your page and the links found on other pages to your site. They do this in an attempt to list only sites of the best quality with content that is relevant to the searches of the users of their site. Google's Pagerank software is another of many displays of integrity and commitment to the users of their site in providing relevant and high quality site references to each individual search query. This makes using Google search faster and smarter for internet searches. It also keeps Google a leader in the search engine/search results market.

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