The Development of Search Engines over time
In this section, we will learn about the development of modern search engines on the internet. This will set the stage to learn about Google's PageRank algorithm. But, before we do that, let's briefly learn how older search engines worked and their shortcomings so that we can see why we need to tap into some deeper mathematics to solve the problem of ranking websites based on searches.
In the early 1990s, search engines were relatively simple. The search engine companies maintained databases of as many websites as they could. Users would search a word, say, chicken, and the search engines would search for websites using the word chicken and rank them based on how many times the word chicken appeared on the website. As you might suspect, this isn't necessarily the best approach.
There are several problems with these simple methods:
- Web pages where a certain search word occurs frequently are not necessarily what...
