Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank at Stanford University.
PageRank is an algorithm for ranking web pages by analyzing the structure of links between them. Its central insight was that a link from one page to another could be treated as a signal of importance, with links from authoritative pages carrying greater weight.
Page and Brin developed the method in the late 1990s while they were graduate students at Stanford. Their research helped form the basis of Google, which they incorporated in 1998. The name PageRank is a wordplay referring both to web pages and to Larry Page.
PageRank was not the same thing as Google Ads, Android, or the Chrome browser. It was an early and influential component of Google's search-ranking system, which later incorporated many additional signals. Alphabet became Google's parent company in 2015, but the search engine remains the business most closely associated with the founders' original research.