Archive: January, 2009

When you are reading a mystery novel, some pages are obviously more important than others. One page of a who-dunnit will feature the ghastly murder by an unidentified hand, another page, usually the last page, will have the smooth-thinking inspector calling out the murderer in a hotel bar, or a ballroom on a luxury cruise ship. Either way, the “Col. Mustard did it with the lead pipe in the billiard room” page is a very important page. If you were to rank the pages in the mystery novel, the page where the identity of the murderer is revealed would in all likelihood be number one with a bullet.

But who decides which page is important? What if I simply want to know what the inspector’s dim-witted assistant was wearing in the Monte Carlo scene on page 42. I’d say page 42 was the more important page, based on my criteria. Good thing there’s a page rank tool, oddly enough called PageRank™ (the trademark is owned by Google, but the patent underneath the hood was developed by Stanford University who has leased exclusive license rights to Google for 1.8 million shares of Google, which were sold in 2005 for $336 million USD). Over the next two blog installments we’ll pop the hood on PageRank™ and see what makes it tick – the original developer was Larry Page, hence PageRank. Now would be a good time to mention that this exploration is not pro or con Google and we should also mention that Yahoo! developed a similar tool, called Webrank that was highly touted in 2004.