Quoted in the article: > Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding. While P

Quoted in the article: > Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding. While Page was indeed a PhD student when he designed that algo, he licensed the patent from Stanford and the university got paid about $500 million for it in Google's IPO. And the guy mostly made it alone. You might as well say people owe their algos to whoever was paying them at the time. Maybe. Work for hire counts. But otherwise, and without personal knowledge of how PageRank was developed, it's a very personal, introverted endeavor (IMO) to design an algo, especially one with as many moving parts as PageRank.