![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/researchonline.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Imagine you\u2019re researching something. Whether you\u2019re a fourth grader who needs to find out how volcanoes erupt or you\u2019re an adult looking for more information regarding a news article, you might want to quickly look something up on the internet. What could go wrong?<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s search engine may seem to have all the answers to your questions. But where does that information come from? Who selects the websites that display when you enter \u201cvolcanic eruption\u201d in the search box? Who decides which item shows up first and in what order the rest will follow?<\/p>\n
I think about these questions a lot because of what I do for a living: helping University of Memphis scholars\u00a0communicate about their work<\/a>\u00a0with academic peers and the public.<\/p>\n These scholars are experts who have worked and studied for a long time to learn all they can about a topic. They answer questions by combining their knowledge with the\u00a0scientific method<\/a>\u00a0to discover new things.<\/p>\n When\u00a0Larry Page and Sergey Brin<\/a>\u00a0created Google\u2019s search engine in 1996 as Stanford University computer science students, they were trying to establish a fast way to easily find things on the internet. At the time,\u00a0searching through the web was slow and difficult<\/a>, making it hard to find the best information.<\/p>\n They invented an algorithm, a detailed step-by-step instruction set or formula, called\u00a0PageRank<\/a>. It works by estimating the quality of a webpage by measuring the number and quality of other pages that link to it. When you search on Google, its search engine returns the highest ranked pages related to what you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\nPage, Brin and PageRank<\/strong><\/h4>\n