I was really confused when we discussed page rank in class so (after supplementary reading) I'll summarize it for anyone else who may have been lost.
Page rank is an algorithm popularized by Google in order to predict which web pages are important. The popularity of web pages is roughly the sum of the rank of all the pages that link toward it. However, the ranks of the linking sites are weighted by the number of links they contain (e.g. if a web site B has only one outbound link and that link is to website A, it gives a big boost to A's rank).
The (1-\alpha)/N term is a dampening factor. It exists to model the behavioral assumption that a surfer will follow links for a while, then eventually get bored and go to a random page.
Apparently the name is clever because it refers to both web pages and Google founder Larry Page.
bwf
@ak47 That's a nice description of page rank. If anyone is interested, you can read more about page rank here: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I was really confused when we discussed page rank in class so (after supplementary reading) I'll summarize it for anyone else who may have been lost.
Page rank is an algorithm popularized by Google in order to predict which web pages are important. The popularity of web pages is roughly the sum of the rank of all the pages that link toward it. However, the ranks of the linking sites are weighted by the number of links they contain (e.g. if a web site B has only one outbound link and that link is to website A, it gives a big boost to A's rank).
The (1-\alpha)/N term is a dampening factor. It exists to model the behavioral assumption that a surfer will follow links for a while, then eventually get bored and go to a random page.
Apparently the name is clever because it refers to both web pages and Google founder Larry Page.
@ak47 That's a nice description of page rank. If anyone is interested, you can read more about page rank here: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html