You’re underestimating the difficulty - actually downloading, parsing and updating the system with billions of pages was a very hard thing in the 1990s.

It's not an algorithmic issue, though, that's a systems issue. GGP was talking about the cyclic link nature which isn't an issue of size, it's an issue of convergence.

In 1997, there were only a hundred thousand web pages. Not even millions. The one billion mark would not be breached until 2016 according to the results of a quick search.

Good thing there weren't billions of pages in the 90's.