Hi Andrew; I found the following book to be helpful when describing both the steps to produce a search engine, and PageRank-style techniques: Langville, Amy N., and C. D. Meyer. Google's Pagerank and Beyond : The Science of Search Engine Rankings. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. It starts at a relatively layperson level of explanation, getting progressively more opaque as you go along, in terms of the computer science. Others you may find helpful if they haven't already been mentioned: Chakrabarti, S.; Dom, B.E.; Kumar, S.R.; Raghavan, P.; Rajagopalan, S.; Tomkins, A.; Gibson, D.; Kleinberg, J. "Mining the Web's Link Structure." Computer 32, no. 8 (August 1999 1999): 60-67. Hansell, Saul. "Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine." The New York Times, June 3, 2007 2007. Levy, Steven. "How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web." Wired, March 2010. Segaran, Toby. "Programming Collective Intelligence Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications." Sebastapol, Calif.: O'Reilly, 2007. Regards, Neal Neal Thomas, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Communication Studies UNC Chapel Hill ---- http://www.hivemedia.ca/