The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web

by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd

This might be the famous paper introducing the PageRank to the ranking research and the famous search engine Google to the Internet. The key idea behind the PageRank that differentiate it from the back link counts is that a back link from an authorized site should be more valuable. Therefore the backlinks must be weighted by its own rank. So the last scanned paper's recursion makes sense.

A more interesting question is how to make a distributed version. I think in a way this is equivalent to solving some linear system but I haven't really try to derive it.

This could be a contributing factor for real ranking algorithm (which uses many other features as well).