Google’s Search Engine History in Pagerank

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 when Page visited the computer science department of Stanford University during a recruitment weekend.

Brin, a second year graduate student at the time, served as a guide for potential recruits, and Page was part of his group. They discussed many topics during their first meeting and disagreed on nearly every issue. Soon after beginning graduate study at Stanford, Page began working on a Web project, initially called BackRub, that exploited the link structure of the Web. Brin found Page’s work on BackRub interesting, so the two started working together on a project that would permanently change Web search. Brin and Page realized that they were creating a search engine that adapted to the ever increasing size of the Web, so they replaced the name BackRub with Google (a common misspelling of googol, the number 10100). Unable to convince existing search engine companies to adopt the technology they had developed but certain their technology was superior to any being used, Brin and Page decided to start their own company. With the financial assistance of a small group of initial investors, Brin and Page founded the Web search engine company Google, Inc. in September 1998.

Almost immediately, the general public noticed what Brin, Page, and others in the academic Web search community already knew — the Google search engine produced much higher quality results than those produced by other Web search engines. Other search engines relied entirely on webpage content to determine ranking of results, and Brin and Page realized that webpage developers could easily manipulate the ordering of search results by placing concealed information on webpages. Brin and Page developed
a ranking algorithm, named PageRank after Larry Page, that uses the link structure of the Web to determine the importance of webpages. During the processing of a query, Google’s search algorithm combined precomputed PageRank scores with text matching scores to obtain an overall ranking score for each webpage. Although many factors determine Google’s overall ranking of search engine results,
Google maintains that the heart of its search engine software is PageRank . A few quick searches on the Internet reveal that both the business and academic communities hold PageRank in high regard. The business community is mindful that Google remains the search engine of choice and that PageRank plays a substantial role in the order in which webpages are displayed. Maximizing the PageRank score of a webpage,
therefore, has become an important component of company marketing strategies. The academic community recognizes that PageRank has connections to numerous areas of mathematics and computer science such as matrix theory, numerical analysis, information retrieval, and graph theory. As a result, much research continues to be devoted to explaining and improving PageRank.