The Blog on Branding

How to SEO – PageRank History

What year did Borat come out, again? Can’t remember? You look it up on Google, right? Google accounted for 72.74% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 25, 2009, according to seekingalpha.com. It seems like Google has taken reign of the internet, or that anyone who talks about search engine optimization not only talks about Google, but sees Google as God – or at least a pretty damn powerful spirit of sorts.

“Google accounted for 72.74% of all U.S. searches in a 4 week period…”

I think people tend to exaggerate Google’s significance in both directions. Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine. People come to Google because they choose to. We don’t trick them.
-Sergery Brin, co-creator of Google

So, Google may not be God or Satan, but do you dare to click to end your relationship? Maybe – if you can stay “just friends” – because there’s a reason we “choose” Google, and you’ll soon find out why.

“So, Google may not be God or Satan…”


This article, about the history of PageRank, is the first of a 30-article series that will take you on a journey toward a better understanding of search engine optimization.

Why we all should take school projects more seriously

You may not have thought your school project could turn into a business, but neither did Joey Rahimi, Larry Page and Sergery Brin – at first. Page and Brin developed Google PageRank as part of a research project, called The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, that started in 1995 at Stanford University. According to Darren Slatten’s The Professional’s Guide to PageRank Optimization, Page and Brin wanted to create a search engine that beat the existing ones that relied heavily on text analysis to calculate relevance.

What is text analysis? Simplified, it’s artificial intelligence (AI) performing linguistics. Traditionally, search engines use a method that looks for syntactic patterns. What’s problematic about this is that words can have more than one meaning or be used figuratively instead of literally; plus, we aren’t completely sure how humans even process word knowledge to communicate and understand language – so how can we tell AI to do it? There are possible solutions that researchers are exploring to help AI understand the lingo used in blogs, websites and more.

Basically, they crawled the web in an attempt to provide more relevant results than other search engines, creating a search engine called BackRub. As they saw it, the algorithm they worked on creating would return higher-quality search results by calculating relevance and importance – that’s where PageRank technology came in.

“Page and Brin crawled the web to find more relevant results.”


The name PageRank “cleverly” derives from its inventor, Larry Page, while it conveniently also makes sense – it’s a ranking Google gives to the page. (What good branding.)

Soon, they outgrew Stanford’s computing infrastructure and rented a garage. In 1998, they founded Google while working on their Ph.D.s in Computer Science – neither ever finished their Ph.D.s because of Google’s success (can you blame them?).

Up next…

The next article in the How to SEO – an SEO Tutorial series will explain what exactly PageRank is and what role it serves. As we’ve seen in its history, text analysis alone is not enough in ensuring an article is relevant; it is missing the human factor – the ability to interpret subtly in language.

Unlike AI, we humans understand the figurative language used in the phrase “spiders crawl the Web.” Human input is essential in understanding language – that’s where we’ll see, PageRank comes into play.

Kara Arnold Like Page and Brin, Kara didn’t get her Ph.D. either – she’ll be added to the Forbes Billionaires list in no time! Want content written for your Brand that shows up #1 on Search Engines and brings you new customers? Contact us for some Pittsburgh SEO.