Interesting find on Google PageRank

Google’s PageRank was always described as a closely guarded secret, which made it a natural target for curiosity. The algorithm drives meaningful revenue and shaped how the entire web was built. Understanding even a part of it felt like reading the rules of the game everyone was already playing.

The core insight, which Smashing Magazine laid out clearly in 2007, was not actually hidden—it was published in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s original 1998 paper. A page’s rank is determined by the quantity and quality of links pointing to it. A link from a high-ranked page transfers more authority than a link from a low-ranked one. The algorithm is applied iteratively across the entire web graph until it converges.

What made this elegant was the analogy it encoded. A link is a vote. But unlike democratic votes, not all votes carry the same weight. An endorsement from a recognized expert means more than one from an anonymous passerby. PageRank operationalized that intuition at web scale, which is why it beat the directory-based search approaches that preceded it.

The “guarded secret” framing was always a little misleading. The underlying mathematics were public. What Google actually protected were the implementation details—the hundreds of signals layered on top of PageRank, the spam-fighting heuristics, the weighting adjustments. Those details change constantly, which is why the algorithm “updates regularly” in ways that move rankings without anyone outside Google knowing exactly why.

What remained constant, and what made it awesome in the literal sense of the word, was the foundational idea: turn the web’s link structure into a measurement of authority, and use that measurement to rank information. That idea generated one of the most successful technology companies in history from a graduate research project.

The paper that started it is still worth reading.