The PageRank Problem, Multi-Agent Consensus and Web Aggregation: A Systems and Control Viewpoint

PageRank is an algorithm introduced in 1998 and used by the Google Internet search engine. It assigns a numerical value to each element of a set of hyperlinked documents (that is, Web pages) within the World Wide Web with the purpose of measuring the relative importance of each page [1]. The key idea in the algorithm is to give a higher PageRank value to Web pages that are visited often by Web surfers. Google describes PageRank as: "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of Web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that are considered important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results".