AFAIK, Google PageRank is part-technology, part-PR.

As Paul Graham says (http://www.paulgraham.com/revolution.html#f1n), what made Google wasn't PageRank: they would have succeeded with a different algorithm. What made Google was that they cared about search and did it really well.

During the time when Google came up, there was a considerable interest in search engines in academia, E.g. Some papers by Udi Manber, a prof at Uni of Arizona at that time had these papers:

U. Manber, and Peter Bigot, ``The Search Broker,'' First Usenix Symp. on Internet Technologies and Systems, Monterey, CA (December 1997), pp. 231-240.

# R. Muth, and U. Manber, ``Approximate Multiple String Search,'' the 7th Annual Combinatorial Pattern Matching Symp., Laguna Beach, CA (June 1996), pp. 75-86.

# U. Manber, M. Smith, and B. Gopal, ``WebGlimpse -- Combining Browsing and Searching,'' Usenix 1997 Annual Technical Conference, Anaheim, CA (January 1997), pp. 195-206.

U. Manber and P.A. Bigot, ``Connecting Diverse Web Search Facilities,'' Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering 21 (June 1988), pp. 21-27.

Ofcourse he was gobbled up by Yahoo at that time and is now a VP at Google

In the 40's? By the time they would have had an opportunity to apply this to making a search engine, its unlikely that they would be in a position to drop everything they were doing and create a startup, assuming they would even remember the research they did so long ago and realize the insane value of making a search engine like that.