PageRank

Larry Page, Stanford University, USA, patent 6,285,999 of 2001. Ranking web pages by the links that point to them.

Overview

As Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin ranked web pages by counting links from other pages, weighting each by the importance of the page it came from. The patent, named for Page and filed in 1998, belonged to Stanford, which granted Google an exclusive license in exchange for shares. Stanford sold those shares in 2005 for over 300 million dollars, one of the most lucrative university licenses ever. Google has since combined PageRank with hundreds of other ranking signals.