PageRank

Why some pages float to the top of search results

A search engine treats every link from one page to another as a vote. If a cooking blog links to a recipe site, that's one vote for the recipe site.

Not all votes count the same. A vote from a page that itself has lots of trust is worth more than a vote from an obscure, barely-linked page.

So a page ends up trusted not just by how many links point to it, but by how trusted the pages sending those links are.

PageRank

Searching 'best pizza dough recipe' and skipping the spam blogs

Type that into a search box and millions of pages mention pizza dough. The ones near the top are usually sites that many other well-known cooking pages link to.

A random blog nobody links to, even if it has the exact same recipe, sinks lower. It hasn't earned votes from pages people already trust.

PageRank

A trusted page's thumbs-up counts more than a stranger's

The trick is to let trust flow through links over and over, like water settling to its level, until every page's score stops changing much.

Pages that end up holding the most trust after that settling process are the ones shown first.