The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search EnginePDF Download

Brin and Page describe the architecture of a large-scale web search engine, including crawling, indexing, ranking, and the use of links. The paper explains search as an engineered system with several interacting parts.

PageRank is only one part of the story. The surrounding implementation detail is what makes this a satisfying read for anyone who wants to understand how a research idea becomes a usable service.