Google thinks like you

PageRank, the computer program that is Google's search formula, works more like our own mind than previously thought.

In a study published in Psychological Science, people were asked to think of a word that begins with a particular letter, and their responses were recorded and ranked by popularity. The Google PageRank result for the letter turned out to be a good predictor of human responses.

When you get the PageRank search results for a search word, what you see is a list of websites associated with that word, ranked by PageRank's website popularity or importance. A web site's importance is determined by how many web pages are linked to the page, and how many web pages are linked to those pages, and so on. Using this method, a seemingly unimportant word can have great notoriety because of it's association with a popular word.

For example, think of the word myrrh. Nobody uses that word much through the year, but it maintains at least moderate importance because of it's link with Christmas, which has a lot of links. link