Please allow me to disagree:
imho Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn't really realise much: they merely reused the same kind of citation-based metrics that was all the rage in Academia for evaluating journals, researchers and institutions.
This could seem breakthrough to general public who only knew Yahoo, but PageRank is really just a very derivative "Impact factor, but on the INTERNET!"
So much so that both are susceptible to the same attacks:
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