PageRank is one of those mysteries that may never be completely unraveled. Volumes have been
written about it, but probably the only two people in the world who understand it completely
are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That’s because it was their brainchild.
PageRank actually started as part of a research project that Page and Brin were working on at
Stanford University. The project involved creating a new search engine that ranked pages in a
democratic fashion with a few weights and measures thrown in for accuracy. Hence, the term.
(What else would you call a ranking system for web pages that was developed by Larry Page?)
The interesting thing about PageRank is that although Page and Brin conceived the idea and created
the algorithm that arrives at a PageRank, it didn’t belong to them. Stanford University actually
owned the patent on the PageRank algorithm until Google purchased the exclusive right to use the
algorithm for 1.8 million shares of the company (which were sold in 2005 for $336 million).