How Google's PageRank Works
Ever wonder how Google sorts through billions of pages to give you the most relevant ones in a fraction of a second? It feels like magic, but a big part of the original "secret sauce" is a brilliant application of a mathematical concept called a Markov chain. This is the core idea behind Google's famous PageRank algorithm. Let's break down how it works. Meet the "Random Surfer" To understand PageRank, imagine a person—let's call them the "random surfer"—who just clicks on links aimlessly. They start on a random webpage and follow a simple rule: they click on any link on that page with equal probability. When they get to the next page, they do the same thing, and so on, forever. This process is a perfect example of a Markov chain. A Markov chain is a mathematical model that