A: Stanford, California, United States
On January 29, 1998 Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group published on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.
"The worldwide web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogeneous. Current estimates are that there are over 150 million web pages with a doubling life of less than one year."