Fictional story
Ry walks into the coffee shop. Larry Page walks in after him and sits down at the same coffee table.
Larry Page: “Here you go, Ry. That Google Search patent everyone was working on is finally done.”
Ry starts reading the patent and gets to this part:
“Most likely, these are the pages to which someone performing a search would like to direct his or her attention. Looked at another way, the importance of a page is directly related to the steady-state probability that a random web surfer ends up at the page after following a large number of links. Because there is a larger probability that a surfer will end up at an important page than at an unimportant page, this method of ranking pages assigns higher ranks to the more important pages.”
U.S. Patent 6,285,999 B1 (Method for Node Ranking in a Linked Database)
Ry, looking perplexed: “So, from my limited understanding, this is saying that if a person were to surf the web and click millions of links in the process, they would eventually gravitate to the more popular sites (high authority) because more links lead to those sites over time.”
Larry Page: “Yeah, something like that. It’s a bit more complicated, but think of it like taking 20 boats and setting them loose in 20 random streams around the world. Eventually, most of them would end up in an ocean because most streams, not all, naturally flow into larger rivers and out to the sea.”
Ry: “Cool. This is good coffee, oh hey Larry, what do you think of my new website url, it’s called ry803083.com , what do you think!!!
Larry Page: It’s good... long pause, Larry Page looks back down at the coffee, this isssss great coffee....