> 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.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7058628B1/en

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Kranar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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-...

	▲	pcrh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Inventorship of patents has a clear legal basis, and is quite different from the basis of scientific authorship. The system disincentifies adding "ghost" inventors since incorrect listing of the inventors can invalidate a patent. So, yes, it's likely that the patent attorneys hired by Stanford advised that only Page should be listed as an inventor. Stanford gets its money via the assignment, not the inventor list.