PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea that has a few VERY wrong assumptions buil

PageRank was a massive improvement over every other option at the time. It was also, in the long run, a terrible idea that has a few VERY wrong assumptions built into it. (As does web search in general.) Larry ended up making PageRank because the number of sites that linked to a site was the best measure when all links were created by humans and the Web wasn't commercialized. It was an automation/algorithm for the measure most link lists/curators used at the time to determine precedence order and importance, but for one thing, that measure only works when the sites themselves are vetted first (you wouldn't get a link on 'Best Science Links on the WWW' unless the author of the site liked your site and was convinced it wasn't full of crap). More broadly, as someone who agrees with OldTimeCoffee but thinks it wasn't purposeful, I'd say that search and web crawlers won an early war I'm not sure they should have won. We can't turn back the clock, but I do wonder what it would have looked like if Google were founded 17 years after the Web started and not 7.