system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:I have a fundamental understanding of what a mathematical algorithm is, but I wonder: Can anyone can explain how Google's PageRank algorithm works?
gpt
Before PageRank, search engines worked in silly ways like frequency of key words used. It made web browsing in the 90s pretty awful. 

A couple of bright guys came along and noticed that it might be useful to say that some sites are more important than others, and if those important sites link to you, you might be somewhat important too. If a page has a high enough ranking, and it links to you, it shared that ranking to some degree.

Bonus trivia: The PageRank patent is actually owned by Stanford, not Google. And it's named after Larry Page, not just because it ranks pages.