Within the late Nineteen Nineties, two Stanford College graduate college students, Larry Web page and Sergey Brin, have been engaged on their PhD analysis once they got here throughout an fascinating thought.
Larry was notably fascinated by the best way internet pages linked to 1 one other. He noticed the web as an enormous community of citations, much like how tutorial papers reference one another. This sparked an thought: what if an internet web page’s significance could possibly be measured by what number of different pages linked to it? However not simply that — what if the significance of these linking pages additionally mattered?
Intrigued by that concept, Larry began constructing an algorithm that may later be named “PageRank” (a intelligent play on his final identify). The algorithm handled every hyperlink to a webpage as a vote of confidence, however with a twist — votes from extra essential pages carried extra weight.
Sergey Brin, excited by Larry’s idea, joined him. Collectively, they labored from their dorm rooms, constructing a search engine that may use this rating system. At first, they known as their mission “BackRub” resulting from its evaluation of backward hyperlinks.