Google’s patented and powerful search algorithm, PageRank, may mimic the way the human brain retrieves information.
Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in which each point represents a different word, with each linked to words that relate to it. Psychologist Tom Griffiths and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is similar to the way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number of sites that link to them.
It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval algorithms, PageRank most clearly matched the human…
