This is flat wrong. No algo, no intelligence or synthetic congnition
> The dramatic rise of Google provides a glimpse into what this kind of privileged access can enable. What allowed Google to rapidly take over the search market was not primarily its PageRank algorithm or clean interface, but these factors in combination with its early access to the data sets of AOL and Yahoo, which enabled it to train PageRank on the best available data on the planet and become substantially better at determining search relevance than any other product.
This is so wrong on so many fronts. A) They has open access to the web just like DMOZ and Yahoo and many others via crawling systems. B) They were attractive to software engineers who in turn made their IT depts in large corps switch to Google as the default search engine C) They stole the ad matching algo from Bill Gross which in turn made them successful. E) too many other factors to list
Lets also not forget that PageRank was a variant of an early link analysis algo that had been around a while.