Created by Krishna Bharat while he was at Compaq Systems Research Center and George A. Mihăilă University of Toronto,[1] it was acquired by Google for use in its news results in February 2003.
[2] The algorithm operates on a special index of expert documents.
The original algorithm relied on independent directories with categorized links to sites.
Results are ranked based on the match between the query and relevant descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to a given result page.
Websites which have backlinks from many of the best expert pages are authorities and are ranked well.