Question

Describe a way to compute the next PageRank of a webpage in the next iteration of PageRank.

A) Update the PageRank using the previous iteration's results
B) Re-crawl the web and recompute from scratch
C) Randomly assign new PageRank values
D) Exclude dead-end pages from the computation

Answer 1

To compute the next PageRank, update it using the results from the previous iteration by redistributing rank through links and applying a damping factor.

Step-by-step explanation:

The PageRank of a webpage can be computed using the previous iteration's results, which is option A: Update the PageRank using the previous iteration's results. In practice, the PageRank algorithm works by transferring rank through the links between pages. To calculate the new rank of a page, you take the PageRanks of each page linking to it, divide each by the number of links that page has, and sum these amounts. The sum is then multiplied by a damping factor (usually set around 0.85), and 1 minus the damping factor is added to the product to account for the possibility of random jumps to any page. This calculation is iteratively updated until the PageRanks converge to a stable set of values.