The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.
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Links as votes
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PageRank treats a link as a citation. Important pages are those linked from other important pages. The idea is simple; running it on the whole web was not.
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Systems at Stanford scale
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The paper covers crawling, indexing compression, and serving latency, not just the algorithm. Google won because the engineering matched the math.
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The web's memory
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Search became how humanity navigates its own writing. This paper is the blueprint for that layer, written when the web still felt small.