The technology behind Google's great results
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
As a Google user, you are proverbial with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google handle to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University .
Building upon the penetrate work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the comparative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every feature of our service on a day by day basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.
Why Google's patented PigeonRank works so well
Pigeon Rank's success relies mainly on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its single capacity to recognize objects despite of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an aptitude that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.
By collecting flocks of pigeons in opaque clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to conventional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, menacing hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings.
When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at glowing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel block with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.