Introduction
PageRank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine how important the page is.
The idea is simple: A page is important if other important pages link to it.
In this post, we’ll break down the logic and code of the PageRank algorithm with a simple Python implementation.
Graph Structure
We’ll represent the web using a directed graph, where:
- Nodes represent pages.
- Edges represent links from one page to another.
Example:
Let’s say we have 4 pages — A, B, C, D — with the following links:
- A → B, C
- B → C
- C → A
- D → C
This can be written as:
graph = {
"A": ["B", "C"],
"B": ["C"],
"C": ["A"],
"D": ["C"]
}