In the beginning, there was BackRub, the service that became Google. Today, Google is most closely associated with its PageRank algorithm. PageRank is a voting algorithm weighted for importance. The indicators of a Web pages importance is the number of pages that link to a particular page. Messrs. Brin and Page soon added another factor which voted for the importance of a Web page. This idea was the number of people who click on a Web page.

The more clicks on a Web page, the more weight that Web page was given. Over time, still other factors have been added to the PageRank algorithm; for example, the frequency with which content on a page is changed.

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