The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine Alive
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
KindPaper
Published1998
StatusAlive
AuthorsBrin & Page
FieldSearch
Sourcewww.seas.upenn.edu ↗
The Stanford paper describing PageRank — links as votes — and the prototype called Google. The research project that became the company's founding document.
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Presented at WWW7 in Brisbane, April 1998, the paper describes PageRank — the web's link structure as a citation graph, a page's rank as a recursive vote weighted by its voters — plus the crawler, index, and the name 'Google' (from googol, the 10^100 figure).
The paper is candid that the prototype ran on scavenged hardware at Stanford and indexed 24 million pages. Within two years the technique built the largest company on Earth by revenue-per-employee and made 'link analysis' an industry.