How does Google's PageRank work?

[Happiness]

It rates a web page out of 10.

[Kenpachi]

There are many different criteria that Google takes into account. For example, the number of links pointing to a page but also the "popularity" of those links (do they come from influent websites or not). Check this page:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Now you have to know that a lot of people are always trying to use the system to influence the Page Rank so Google has to review and modify its algorithms frequently.

[azhar_itguy]

Hello..

Google Search Technology is very complex, so it cant be explain in few words.I will just give u definition here and you learn indepth about this technology in the sources i have provided.

PAGE RANK

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

From Azhar
http://www.itinfo.co.in


SOURCES
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
http://www.google.com/technology/
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

[Daryl]

a complex to undestand algo

it calcualtes the popularity of your website according to link pointing to your website ....