Google is such an effective search engine

One of the reasons why Google is such an effective search engine is the PageRank algorithm developed by Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, when they were graduate students at Stanford University. Page Rank is determined entirely by the link structure of the World Wide Web. It is recomputed about once a month and does not involve the actual content of any Web pages or individual queries. Then, for any particular query, Google finds the pages on the Web that match that query and lists those pages in the order of their Page Rank. Imagine surfing the Web, going from page to page by randomly choosing an outgoing link from one page to get to the next. This can lead to dead ends at pages with no outgoing links, or cycles around cliques of interconnected pages. So, a certain fraction of the time, simply choose a random page from the Web. This theoretical random walk is known as a Markov chain or Markov process. The limiting probability that an infinitely dedicated random surfer visits any particular page is its PageRank. A page has high rank if other pages with high rank link to it.