Google creators win inaugural Test of Time award at WWW2015 in Florence, Italy

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, won the inaugural Test of Time award at WWW2015 in Florence, for one of the most influential works ever published in computer science.

The duo won the award, which honours those who have enjoyed lasting success in the web industry, for their 1998 paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. First presented at the 7th World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, the paper introduced the concept of a distributed system that would use the hyperlink structure of the web as an indicator of relevance.

The two student authors had described their goal as being “to produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems”.

The paper, which, of course, was the genesis of the world’s pre-eminent search engine, has been cited more than 13,000 times, and continues to gain several more each day.

Larry and Sergey sent a video message to delegates at WWW2015, expressing their thanks. Sergey said, “There is still a ton of work to do in search, and on the web as a whole, and I couldn’t think of a more exciting time to be working in this space.”