Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Metric
Google's original link-based ranking algorithm, from the BackRub research project at Stanford.
Glossary · PageRank and BackRub
PageRank is the link-analysis algorithm Google's founders invented; BackRub was their 1995 Stanford search engine, soon renamed Google. Google's ranking systems guide says PageRank has evolved and is still part of its core ranking systems.
Documented in
Google's ranking systems guide says PageRank, one of its core ranking systems when Google first launched, has evolved a lot since then and continues to be part of its core ranking systems.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Google's company history page says the Google story began in 1995 at Stanford, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine that used links to judge the importance of pages, called it Backrub and soon renamed it Google; Google Inc. was founded in August 1998.
Google · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google's quality talk called PageRank the speaker's favourite ranking system, elegant in its time, but said Google does not really use it so much anymore.
In the mid-1990s the web was small enough to list in one manually edited directory; by the time BackRub was being built, directories could no longer find information on the growing web, which is why Google was created.
Google began as a Stanford research project in 1995: Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine on an algorithm they invented, PageRank, and called the engine BackRub.
BackRub was renamed Google when it launched officially, which the speaker dated to 1997-98.
Google's slide said there is not one single ranking system and named spam detection systems, the reviews system, BERT, MUM, RankBrain, freshness systems, deduplication systems, crisis information systems and link analysis systems (PageRank).
The remark that PageRank is not used so much anymore differs from Google's ranking systems guide, which says PageRank has evolved a lot and continues to be part of the core ranking systems; read it as PageRank weighing less among many signals, not as PageRank being switched off, so links still matter.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Kit items about PageRank: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Also inglossary term PageRank and BackRub
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.