We've all experienced, from time to time, a kind of compulsive web surfing in which we follow link after link, browsing content that becomes less and less relevant to the task at hand. This happened to me only yesterday: while working on some artificial intelligence research, I clicked on something interesting, followed a few links, and 20 minutes later found I was deep into an article about the human brain and consciousness. Strangely enough, this random surfer model of Internet browsing also lies at the heart of one of the most revolutionary pieces of code to impact the Internet age: Google's PageRank algorithm.

MacCormick, John. Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack: The Algorithm That Ranked the Internet. In You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, edited by Torie Bosch, 108-112. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

John MacCormick is a professor of Computer Science at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Princeton University Press's Website. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expected-to-understand-this

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