Researched
Web search and PageRank
Page and Brin's PageRank (1998) ranked web pages by who links to them, making the exploding web searchable.
Open in the interactive tree →Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford treated every link as a vote and computed a page's rank as the chance that a random surfer lands on it, a Markov-chain calculation. They described the method in 1998 and founded Google that September. Search turned the web from a directory into something anyone could use, and its advertising model built the first giant internet platform.
Prerequisites
- Probability Theory1654
- Graph Theory (Euler)1736The web is a graph of pages and links, ranked by a random walk on it
- Markov Chains1906PageRank is the stationary distribution of a Markov chain
- Citation Index (SCI)1964PageRank's patent cites Garfield's citation analysis: links count as votes
- World Wide Web1991
Unlocks
- Platform Economy1995-2009Search advertising built the first giant internet platform
- Platform Regulation (DMA/DSA)2023-2026Google Search is a designated DMA gatekeeper service