<P> PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is . The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites . </P> <P> It is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search engine results, but it is the first algorithm that was used by the company, and it is the best - known . </P> <P> PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set . The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references . The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by P R (E). (\ displaystyle PR (E).) Other factors like Author Rank can contribute to the importance of an entity . </P> <P> A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, taking into consideration authority hubs such as cnn.com or usa.gov . The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page . A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support . The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself . </P>

Which of the following best describes a major mechanism that search engines use to rank pages
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