Interesting trivia. One of the inspirations for Page Rank was undoubtably the Science Citation Index. Which was ultimately inspired by a 1945 article called As We May Think by Vanevar Bush.
HTML is inspired by the idea of hypertext, which was inspired by the idea of a memex machine, which was invented in a 1945 article called As We May Think by Vanevar Bush. Yes, the same article.
In other words Google lives in the intersection of two ideas whose history both trace back to the same essay. An essay written before most of us were alive. With that in mind it is interesting to read http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... to see how it lead in both directions.
HTML is inspired by the idea of hypertext, which was inspired by the idea of a memex machine, which was invented in a 1945 article called As We May Think by Vanevar Bush. Yes, the same article.
In other words Google lives in the intersection of two ideas whose history both trace back to the same essay. An essay written before most of us were alive. With that in mind it is interesting to read http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... to see how it lead in both directions.