Seo

How Google ranks

All the best businesses start in garages and all the best search engines
start on university campuses. It really is true. At its outset, Google was
the research project (nicknamed “BackRub”) of two Stanford PhD students:
Michigan-born Larry Page and Russian Sergey Brin. At the time
there were already many successful search engines, with Altavista the
market leader. While everyone else was focused on size and quantity
(how to index all of the fast-growing web), Page was obsessed by quality
(how to rank the most relevant pages near the top of your results).

In his original thesis research, Page hypothesized that any link from
one site to another was akin to an academic citation; the description (or
anchor text) attached to that link was like an annotation. If one could
identify the sites most cited for any given annotated subject, one could
establish a pecking order of significance for any given subject area.
What particularly fascinated Page was what he saw as a fundamental
weakness in Tim Berners-Lee’s original design for the web; namely,
that it was possible to see easily what any site was linking to, but very
hard (if not impossible) to see the sites linking back. BackRub sought to
catalogue all the links on the web and, through doing so, establish which
sites had the most “authority” overall and on any given topic. Page
insists that it was never his intention at this point to create a search
engine. However, intellectual curiosity drove him forward into the creation
of a new kind of crawler, based on a link-ranking system; the first
(and still best) of its kind.

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