I’m not sure myself, but the general PageRank algorithm (the method of adjacency matrix eigenvectors for determining critical nodes) had been around since the 60s, but hadn’t been properly mapped to the site ranking problem until them (which is not a trivial problem at self, at least at the stage of recognizing the relevance).
Do you think no one else could invent PageRank?
I’m not sure myself, but the general PageRank algorithm (the method of adjacency matrix eigenvectors for determining critical nodes) had been around since the 60s, but hadn’t been properly mapped to the site ranking problem until them (which is not a trivial problem at self, at least at the stage of recognizing the relevance).
Supposedly PageRank isn’t even very important anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time.