These aren’t algorithms, they are just hand waving intuition that is “on the right track” but not quite there. You see similar “prior art” to Newtonian physics,

These aren’t algorithms, they are just hand waving intuition that is “on the right track” but not quite there. You see similar “prior art” to Newtonian physics, for example, but there is still a huge leap from “oh, there might be something in these linkages” to “if we compute the stationary distribution of the Markov chain over the graph, we know the relative importance of each node.” Kleinberg was the first to algorithmically and rigorously codify this intuition.