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Concept
Ranking (information retrieval)
Summary
Ranking of query is one of the fundamental problems in information retrieval (IR), the scientific/engineering discipline behind search engines. Given a query q and a collection D of documents that match the query, the problem is to rank, that is, sort, the documents in D according to some criterion so that the "best" results appear early in the result list displayed to the user. Ranking in terms of information retrieval is an important concept in computer science and is used in many different applications such as search engine queries and recommender systems. A majority of search engines use ranking algorithms to provide users with accurate and relevant results.
The notion of page rank dates back to the 1940s and the idea originated in the field of economics. In 1941, Wassily Leontief developed an iterative method of valuing a country's sector based on the importance of other sectors that supplied resources to it. In 1965, Charles H Hubbell at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a technique for determining the importance of individuals based on the importance of the people who endorse them.
Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin came up with an approach to rank journals. Their rule was that a journal is important if it is cited by other important journals. Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, developed an almost identical approach to PageRank which was called Hypertext Induced Topic Search or HITS and it treated web pages as "hubs" and "authorities".
Google’s PageRank algorithm was developed in 1998 by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and it is a key part of Google’s method of ranking web pages in search results. All the above methods are somewhat similar as all of them exploit the structure of links and require an iterative approach.
Ranking functions are evaluated by a variety of means; one of the simplest is determining the precision of the first k top-ranked results for some fixed k; for example, the proportion of the top 10 results that are relevant, on average over many queries.
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