The delivery of ranked relevant results is probably the most important factor in making a web search engine acceptable to its users. This inspiration has led the search engine engineers and researchers to conceive ranking algorithms that can provide the most relevant results (webpages) at the top of the Search Engines Results Page (SERP). To rank webpages, several features are exploited in research studies related to the content and link structure of the web. This article discusses and assesses the webpage ranking algorithms proposed in the domains of content-based and link-based rankings in the past two decades. The assessment of these algorithms is done using features extracted from the relevant literature. The strengths and limitations of these features as well as the ranking algorithms are highlighted and discussed. The findings of this work suggest that the link-based ranking factors are still the dominant force in ranking webpages but these alone are by no means enough to fulfill the information needs of the users. An acceptable solution must contain features from both the content-based and link-based ranking domains integrated with the temporal features and users’ behavior information. Possible future directions are also highlighted.

排名相关结果的传递可能是使Web搜索引擎为用户所接受的最重要因素。这一灵感促使搜索引擎工程师和研究人员构思了可以在搜索引擎结果页面（SERP）顶部提供最相关结果（网页）的排名算法。为了对网页进行排名，在与网络的内容和链接结构有关的研究中利用了多种功能。本文讨论并评估了过去二十年来在基于内容的排名和基于链接的排名领域中提出的网页排名算法。这些算法的评估是使用从相关文献中提取的特征来完成的。这些功能的优点和局限性以及排名算法都得到了强调和讨论。这项工作的发现表明，基于链接的排名因素仍然是对网页进行排名的主导力量，但仅靠这些因素还不足以满足用户的信息需求。可接受的解决方案必须包含来自基于内容的排名域和基于链接的排名域的功能，并与时间功能和用户的行为信息集成在一起。还突出了可能的未来方向。