A bit of a follow-up to my previous post. You can read a very geeky article about how google's search engine works here. I didn't read the whole thing (too mathematical), but even reading just the beginning where they explain about page rank I thought was very interesting.
My favourite part of the article is the opening:
Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you'd like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?
Posed in this way, the problem seems impossible. Yet this description is not too different from the World Wide Web, a huge, highly-disorganized collection of documents in many different formats.
Something (from the article) that I found particularly cool to play around with is this page rank checker. It's only an estimate, but it's fun to play around with. Can you find any pages with rank 10? :D The only one I tried that got 10 was google itself ;-P But I found a couple of 9s (wikipedia, IMDb,yahoo).
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