Getting to 'the Right Stuff'

摘要

In a world awash with infor-mation, finding what you really want can be difficult. Any database or web index can deliver a set of results. But it's particularly difficult to highlight the most relevant "stuff." Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo try their best to recommend some items over others, and now libraries are trying to do this for their holdings. The classic Google-style ranking algorithm takes into account not only the popularity of a particular web page (by how many sites link to it) but also the popularity of the web sites that point to it. A really popular "pointer" page produces higher-ranked results.