Google PR Monitor is a small Windows gadget that will help you
knows Google PageRank of selected site (page).
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by
the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to
each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web,
with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The
algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal
quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given
element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by
PR(E).
The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process
has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned
to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license
rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8
million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were
sold in 2005 for $336 million.
A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the graph, the
webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as
edges, taking into consideration authority hubs such as cnn.com or usa.gov.
The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to
a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined
recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that
link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with
high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web
page there is no support for that page.
Numerous academic papers concerning PageRank have been published since
Page and Brin's original paper. In practice, the PageRank concept has proven
to be vulnerable to manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to
identifying falsely inflated PageRank and ways to ignore links from
documents with falsely inflated PageRank.
Other link-based ranking algorithms for Web pages include the HITS
algorithm invented by Jon Kleinberg (used by Teoma and now Ask.com), the IBM
CLEVER project, and the TrustRank algorithm.
Release history
