Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0179/
Research · April 1998
PageRank and web scale
Brin and Page described a search engine that scores a page's importance by the structure of links to it rather than by the page's own content.
Why it matters
The question of what matters here was solved across millions of documents, creating the infrastructure the later training data grew out of.
PageRank computes the probability that a random surfer lands on a page, so a link from an important page counts for more. The paper also describes the architecture: crawling, indexing, storage. In this atlas it is an infrastructure record: the company founded the same year later produced the Transformer, TensorFlow and a large share of the computation the present field rests on.
Event record
- Event date
- April 1998
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0179
Presented at the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference in April 1998.
Related events
Earlier
Later
- Related Wikipedia launches 2001links to this record
The same movement: web content becomes a resource machines can process.
- Related The iPhone 2007links to this record
With the web it forms the precondition: a permanently connected device with sensors in every pocket.
- Related ImageNet 2009
Web scale as a source of data is the precondition later datasets depended on.
- Contrasts A knowledge graph inside Google Search 2012links to this record
The announcement sets itself against the earlier model in its own words: "For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries." Ranking pages by links stayed, but beside it appeared an answer about a thing rather than a page.