Programming Collective Intelligence: Searching and Ranking

Overview

This paper covers full-text search engines, which allow people to search a large set of documents for a list of words, and which rank results according to how relevant the documents are to those words. Algorithms for full-text searches are among the most important collective intelligence algorithms, and many fortunes have been made by new ideas in this field. It is widely believed that Google's rapid rise from an academic project to the world's most popular search engine was based largely on the PageRank algorithm, a variation that the user will learn about in this paper.