2016 The $25000000000 Eigenvector The Linear Algebra behind Google.pdfVIP

c SIAM REVIEW 2006 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Vol. 48 ,No. 3 ,pp. 569–581 The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra behind Google∗ Kurt Bryan† Tanya Leise‡ Abstract. Google’s success derives in large part from its PageRank algorithm, which ranks the im- portance of web pages according to an eigenvector of a weighted link matrix. Analysis of the PageRank formula provides a wonderful applied topic for a linear algebra course. Instructors may assign this article as a project to more advanced students or spend one or two lectures presenting the material with assigned homework from the exercises. This material also complements the discussion of Markov chains in matrix algebra. Maple and Mathematica files supporting this material can be found at /∼bryan. Key words. linear algebra, PageRank, eigenvector, stochastic matrix AM Ssubject classifications. 15-01, 15A18, 15A51 DOI. 10.1137/050623280 1. Introduction. When Google went online in the late 1990s, one thing that set it apart from other search engines was that its search result listings always seemed to deliver the “good stuff” up front. With other search engines you often had to wade through screen after screen of links to irrelevant we bpages that just happened to match the search text. Part of the magic behind Google is its PageRank algorithm, which quantitatively rates the importance of each page on the web, allowing Google to rank the pages and thereby present