The Ruins

Introduction

The history that has unfolded to provide what is the current World Wide Web and all of its benefits has its roots in networking and the child of government research. An interesting point of the internet and the World Wide Web is that the creator of the internet is Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee and much unlike the founders of Google is not a man of vast riches. The schematic for what is known as the web comes by way of a proposal that Berners-Lee made in March of 1989 under which he was able to successfully implement a communication stream between an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) client and a server in November of 1989. This simple protocol that is the root of electronic commerce, i.e., Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) has also given way to the mobile revolution that is currently underway. While it may have been the application of networking topology that has led humanity to where it is today and the foundation for what is part of the content of this book it is something slightly different that has created the mechanism that drives the architecture of indexing. The current indexing paradigm is driven by mathematics and the proposition that value or indexing prominence can be directly derived by way of a fundamental truth, which is tied to the node under inspection.

In this text a discourse is undertaken as to what drives relevance on the web and specially how these factors of worth lead to the realization of a fundamental architectural footprint for web development that has its roots in the remnants of the past. The HITS algorithm is one component from the past that brought forth a mechanism to model search relevance by looking at the link structure and assigning an authority value to the graph edges in the link network. The most famous of the algorithms that have laid the path to where the community at large stands is the PageRank algorithm. The PageRank algorithm is a mechanism by which sink relevance is determined by way of the link structure. The relevance of a sink node is determined due to the quantity of links that point to this destination – a metric that can be determined directly by way of the appendages of a network architecture. The central premise in each of the algorithms is to assign worth based upon how many times a particular node is referenced. The doctrine prescribed to here is quite rudimentary if you think about it and quite common in everyday life. Kids in school are popular because of the quantity of friends that they have. Journal publications are deemed to be relevant by the quantity of peer journals that reference it. So, whether the discussion is in reference to a network structure, a social construct, or academic prominence the central tenant remains the same and this being that popularity or relevance rather is tied to points of reference. If this argument is allowed to take a pragmatic stance for a minute whereby a mathematical context is translated to plain simple English, it would resemble something as follows.

In a similar manner the PageRank algorithm could also be translated and for which the translation of the mathematical context to plain English would result in verbiage such as the following.