What is Google PageRank

Google PageRank is how Google calculates a site's "importantness". It works based on a simple concept, if a lot of sites link to you, and you dont link to a lot of sites (relatively speaking) your site would be considered quite important, but if almost no page links to your site and your site links to a LOT of other sites, it would be considered unimportant.

How does it work

First of all, we would be smart to start off with a type of puzzle called a "Goozzle" (Google+Puzzle). This functions in quite the same way as a website would. Let's start off simple, and explain as we go. Meet your first Goozzle:

The rules are as follows:

1. The numbers you enter at the top (the blue squares) need to be divided equally over the empty squares below it.
2. When the numbers are added horizontally, the green 1 needs to match the blue 1, the blue 2 the green 2, etc.
3. You can only use whole numbers (integers), so if the one has three empty squares below it, you can only fill in a multiple of three there.

This particular goozzle can be solved easily by filling in 1,2,2. Resulting in the following:

As you can see, the results all match up and all numbers are divided equally. You might be wondering what this has to do with a Google PageRank, but that's up next!

Goozzle meets the web

So, we now know how Goozzle's work, and how they can be solved. Now look at the following picture:

In this picture, B1, B2 and B3 represent webpages. Pay close attention to:

• B1 links to B3 and there's an open square below the one. On the third place.
• B2 links to B1 and B3. There's an open space below the two on the first and third place.
• B3 links to B1 and B2. There's two open spaces below the three on the first two places.

So a Goozzle is really an alternate representation of the internet. The numbers we have as a solution are quite similar to a PageRank, the higher the number, the more important the page is. Page B3 has the highest number as solution so B3 is obviously most important, then is B1 and lastly B2.

That's all I can be bothered to type for now, we'll continue with this next time :)