Within the late Nineties, two Stanford College graduate college students, Larry Web page and Sergey Brin, have been engaged on their PhD analysis after they got here throughout an fascinating concept.
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, just like how tutorial papers reference one another. This sparked an concept: what if an online web page’s significance might 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 will 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 vital pages carried extra weight.
Sergey Brin, serious about Larry’s idea, joined him. Collectively, they labored from their dorm rooms, constructing a search engine that will use this rating system. At first, they referred to as their challenge “BackRub” as a consequence of its evaluation of backward hyperlinks.