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PageRank [Page et al. 1999] is a ranking technique used by today’s search engines. It is query independent and content independent; it can be computed offline using only the Web graph (the Web graph is the directed graph whose nodes are URLs and whose arcs correspond to hyperlinks). These features make it interesting when we need to assign an absolute measure of importance to each Web page.

Originally at the basis of Google’s ranking algorithm, PageRank is now just one of the many parameters used by search engines to rank pages. Albeit no public information is available on the current degree of utilization of PageRank in real-world search engines, it is likely that in certain areas, for instance, selective crawling (deciding which pages to crawl) and inverted index reordering