In the late 1990s, two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were working on their PhD research when they came across an interesting idea.
Larry was particularly fascinated by the way web pages linked to one another. He saw the internet as a vast network of citations, similar to how academic papers reference each other. This sparked an idea: what if a web page’s importance could be measured by how many other pages linked to it? But not just that — what if the importance of those linking pages also mattered?
Intrigued by that idea, Larry started building an algorithm that would later be named “PageRank” (a clever play on his last name). The algorithm treated each link to a webpage as a vote of confidence, but with a twist — votes from more important pages carried more weight.
Sergey Brin, interested in Larry’s concept, joined him. Together, they worked from their dorm rooms, building a search engine that would use this ranking system. At first, they called their project “BackRub” due to its analysis of backward links.