(46-50)
Google, the largest search engine on the Internet, was
founded in 1996. It started as a research project by Larry Page,
a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, who was exploring
the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web for his
dissertation thesis. The name he gave his study, “Google,”
comes from the misspelling of the word, “googol,” which
refers to the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. Although
not quite the number its name signifies, Google receives
several hundred million inquiries each day from users around
the world.
One of the main reasons Google has become the most
used search engine on the net is due to the PageRank system,
a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical rank to each
element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World
Wide Web. PageRank gives every site on the Internet a ranking
between 0 and 10. The ranking is determined by the number
of other pages linked to it. Each link is calculated as a vote,
therefore, the more links a site has, the more votes it gets.
Google analyzes the importance of the web site that provides
links to other web sites. If Google determines that a web site
is important, it assigns a higher PageRank ranking to links to
that particular site, which, in turn, influences the site’s ranking.
There have been some criticisms of the PageRank system.
Some critics, for example, claim that it is unfairly biased in
favor of the larger web sites. Other critics point out the fact
that the criteria for determining the importance of a web site
is not subjected to rankings by peer or professional reviewers,
who would better scrutinize the ranking decisions. Another
flaw in the system noted by critics is the use of “Google Bombs”
on websites. The term refers to the manipulation of the
ranking of a given page by explicitly placing hyperlinks that will
directly affect its ranking. Google announced in January, 2007
that they had changed their search engine algorithm to make
it more difficult to manipulate search results.
Though there are critics of Google and its PageRank
system for its system of ordering search results, it remains as,
arguably, the most effective way of providing relevant
websites for a web search and is considered the most used
search engine. Therefore, Google shows no sign of losing its
title as the optimal search engine. The word “google” has even
been added into the Merriam Webster Collegiate dictionary
and the Oxford dictionary as a new verb. It means “to use the
Google search engine to acquire information on the Internet.”
【題組】47.What variable does the PageRank system use for ranking
web sites?
(A)By the number of documents linked to it.
(B)By the number of queries linked to it.
(C)By the number of pages linked to it.
(D)By the number of users linked to it.
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