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"For example, the algorithm Google uses to determine the order of search results, called PageRank, is a type of Markov chain."

I had to research that to understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Here is some key text from Wikipedia:

Google recalculates PageRank scores each time it crawls the Web and rebuilds its index. As Google increases the number of documents in its collection, the initial approximation of PageRank decreases for all documents.

The formula uses a model of a random surfer who gets bored after several clicks and switches to a random page. The PageRank value of a page reflects the chance that the random surfer will land on that page by clicking on a link. It can be understood as a Markov chain in which the states are pages, and the transitions, which are all equally probable, are the links between pages.

If a page has no links to other pages, it becomes a sink and therefore terminates the random surfing process. If the random surfer arrives at a sink page, it picks another URL at random and continues surfing again.




That's increadibly easy (it is!)

I can't understand why Google owns it.

Especially today ("~15 years later") and with a lot of good open source software available.





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