This sacred text, written by some unknown hagiographer, pretends to depict the theory of Creation of the Fundamental Search Engine and how it was conceived by the gods. The original texts are thought to have been translated from a lost page somewhere near the end of the internet at babelfish. They probably date from a pre-semantic web era, but it's difficult to say which.

We're back in 1994 (or so), at the Computer Sciences Department of Stanford University, California. Two friends, let's call them Laurel and Sargi, have just engaged an amene conversation:

L: Hey Sargi, look here.
S: What?
L: Consider an internet page. I know where it links to ... but ... I don’t know where it’s linked from.
S: Why should I care?
L: Ok, remember our professor’s papers? And the citations they contain to their peers?
S: What about?
L: Well, citations to peers in a paper are pretty much like links to other pages in a webpage. You know who the paper cites to, but you don’t know whom the paper is cited from.
S: Boorriiiinnnng! ....
L: Wait, but the thing IS what determines the relevance of a paper is the number of citations it gets from its peers.
S: So?
L: So, It’s a pain in the butt to actually calculate it. Editors spend a lot of their effort in counting how many citations a paper gets. That way scholarly colleagues may rank the relevance of their papers.
S: Sheesh, you really have weird interests.
L: Maybe, BUT if we could tell how many links a page gets, then we could rank it!
S: Well Laurel, that must be the most pointless idea I've ever heard in my whole life!
L: Yeah! And I convinced my teacher to endorse it as my final project. Wanna help me?
S:Ok, sure! Let's do it.