| Google, the world’s most popular search engine, offers a practical tool to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” according to its creators. Through searches codified by means of keywords, Google offers results in the form of lists of websites organized hierarchically and majorly based on a priority rank called PageRank. PageRank is a patented link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, “that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the Internet, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.” The presence of hyperlinks within a site would help to increase their position, the theory behind it being that “web pages linked from many important pages are themselves likely to be important” (the notion of important or non-important being purely human and subjective, this being ultimately the heart of Google’s so-called “democratic philosophy”: we can all have a say).34 The PageRank of a given website depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it. A page that is linked to by many other pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, then there is less support for that page. In addition to PageRank, Google applies numerous other disclosed and non-disclosed criteria to determine the ranking of pages on result lists. Currently, the search engine’s ongoing challenge is to enhance its ranking methodologies in such a way that each user may find the most personalized result for his or her online search (as well as the most personalized ads, both based on all the personal information about each individual user that Google has progressively stored, based on previous searches, navigation patterns, personal information provided by users through Gmail and registration into other partner programs, etc.).35
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