Information retrieval · 1998 · Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Use Web link structure as a ranking signal while engineering crawling, indexing, storage, and serving as one measurable large-scale system.
The central move
Use Web link structure as a ranking signal while engineering crawling, indexing, storage, and serving as one measurable large-scale system.
Why it had to exist
The Web outgrew manually curated directories and keyword-frequency ranking. Useful search needed both a better relevance signal and an architecture able to process an expanding graph.
Where it leads
Web graph → search ranking → large distributed indexing → platform feedback loops.