I'd say rather that it wasn't designed for modern adversarial scenarios. Google won the search engine wars because PageRank did better in the late 90s adversari

I'd say rather that it wasn't designed for modern adversarial scenarios. Google won the search engine wars because PageRank did better in the late 90s adversarial environment, where every page was packed with white-on-white keywords. It was significantly harder to create a counterfeit influence graph than to keyword spam with hidden text elements. That all seems pretty quaint these days, but even worms and viruses at the time were versions of "my goodness, who would ever write a script that emails itself to your address book, or copies itself across the network to all the other unsecured PCs with passwordless full hard drive access?"