As seen on Slashdot, but worth reposting. The AMS (American Mathematical Society) has an accessible article on the PageRank algorithm.

“Google’s PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims, “the heart of our software is PageRank.” As we’ll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages.”

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