Lots of Grandparents (or Google PageRank)
How does Google Page Rank work? Its no mystery. Its got a very simple complicated mathematical explanation.
Every page has incoming and outgoing links. A page is valued by the quantity and quality of incoming links. The quantity is the number of incoming links that link to this page. The quality is the number of incoming links to pages with outgoing links to this page. Its kind of like a genealogical tree where the more living ancestors you have, the more gifts you get and the more you are worth.
Thats it. At least, thats the really basic concept. When you get into the mathematics of it, it starts getting pretty twisted:
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html
You can mess around with a PageRank calculator to help you understand the basics of the basic PageRank system:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php
The major (nonmathematical) complication comes into play when you try to define the “quality” of an outgoing link:
http://www.uspto.gov/
PageRank on a small number of pages can be quite simple, but on a large scale like Google, Live, MSN, Ask or Yahoo, its a whole new game.
Google’s short explanation: http://www.google.com/technology/