As a practical example, let's look at the PageRank algorithm, which was initially used by Google to rank the search results of a user query. It generates a number that quantifies the importance of search results in the context of the query the user has executed. This was designed by two Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at Stanford in the late 1990s, who also went on to start Google.
The PageRank algorithm was named after Larry Page, who created it with Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford University.
Let's first formally define the problem for which PageRank was initially designed.