alt Hacker News> Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with this precise algorithm, i.e., PageRank, which was one of the key algorithms that helped catapult Google into a household name and made them tons of money. Both Sergey and Larry were grad students at Stanford, so their coming up with such an amazing algorithm doesn’t seem surprising.
No, Brin wasn’t a co-inventor of PageRank.
Inventor in the context of a U.S. patent has a very narrow and technical meaning, different from the broader concept of "coming up with something." Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank together as grad students in Stanford's Digital Library Project, led by Hector Garcia-Molina. This is simply undisputable and both are listed as co-authors of the PageRank paper [1]. The list of inventors on a patent, especially nowadays, should not be seen as a historical finding about credit.
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-PageRank-Citation-...