How to Measure Who is the most important? An Introduction to PageRank

How to Measure Who is the most important? An Introduction to PageRank

9/14/2025

1. Introduction

Have you ever wondered how Google shows you the most relevant websites when you searched something? Or who is the most important person in a group of people? How can we correlate human behaviour and mathematical equations? All these questions show one common result: PageRank. PageRank is a mathematical algorithm that measures the importance of a social network.

As human beings, we have behaviors and we can decide how important we think a certain person is. For example, if we think a person is important, we will be more likely to follow him or her on social media. Actually by doing this, we create a network of connections between people without realizing it. But you may ask, what is the similarity between this and websites?