Remember the days of Dogpile? AltaVista? Or even HotBot? Lycos? Metcrawler? Excite circa 1996? Or even when we would Ask Jeeves a question? How about Backrub, the search engine that ran on Stanford’s severs in 1995? No? Well, the little engine that could was renamed Google in 1997 — the only company whose name is synonymous with search. (Although, its competitor to the North, Bing, has a deal with Gossip Girl that makes “just bing it” part of the show. But that’s beside the point…) At Google’s inception, and other search engines like it, we would simply type in keywords and get an ordered list of results. Lovely, right? Google’s search engine algorithm has been refined over the years to meet the needs of its users. The current algorithm, PageRank, uses a universal … Read entire article »