pagerank or page rank

Noun or Noun phrase. Named for Larry Page, primary author of the algorithm created to compute the value. 1) A recursive (q.v. recursion) link-based probability distribution used to assess the importance of Web documents by counting and valuing the links between documents according to the number and value of the links pointing to the documents. PageRank is based on citation analysis, a controversial but long-standing practice of assessing the quality and value of scientific papers based on the number of other scientific papers referring to them. 2) A derivative value computed from the first PageRank and defined across an integer scale ranging from 0 to 10; often identified as Toolbar PageRank or denoted as TBPR.