which of the following best describes a major mechanism that search engines use to rank pages
PageRank PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by   P R ( E ) .  {\displaystyle PR(E).}  Other factors like Author Rank can contribute to the importance of an entity.