Google’s PageRank was created at Stanford University by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Even though Google’s conceived and implemented PageRank when their search engine was still new, the vast majority of Internet users (even those who use Google daily) are entirely ignorant of what PageRank is. For the most part they have neither read about it nor even seen it mentioned. It is still a common misconception that Google, as well as Yahoo!, spits out search results based solely on the number of times a word appears on a page.

This is wrong. Many of the older search engines, AltaVista for instance, did perform searches based solely on the number of times a word appears on a page before and during the first wave of the Internet boom. However, the frequency of a word alone will yield poor results for almost any search. This approach is vulnerable to “keyword stuffing” (the webmaster’s placement of the word you are targeting over and over on a single page for no inherent reason).

Google has changed the way search engines return results with its PageRank algorithm, and other search engines are quickly following suit. Yahoo! used Google’s results mixed with their own Yahoo! Directory until roughly two months ago, when they finished developing their own version of PageRank, named Web Rank. Yahoo! knew it could not return good enough results to retain customers without the help of Google. Therefore, if it wished to become independent again, it had to face facts and implement a PageRank-like algorithm.