Success Quote by Larry Page

Understatement is doing a lot of work here. Larry Page calls his breakthrough "quite complicated and sounds circular" as if he’s apologizing for a clever math trick at a whiteboard, not outlining the logic that would end up reorganizing the modern internet. The plainspoken tone reads like engineer modesty, but it also disarms: by conceding the idea sounds weird, he pre-emptively neutralizes skepticism. You can almost hear the pitch to early users and investors: yes, it’s recursive, yes, it’s counterintuitive, but it’s not mystical.

The subtext is a quiet power move. "Importance" is a slippery human judgment dressed up as something measurable, and the quote treats that translation as a solved problem. Page isn’t just describing an algorithm; he’s proposing a new social contract for information: if enough reputable pages point to you, you matter. That’s the circularity he’s nodding to, and it’s exactly why it works. On the web, authority is relational. Links are endorsements, citations, alliances. PageRank formalized that messy human behavior into a scalable proxy for trust.

Context sharpens the stakes. In the late 1990s, search was a swamp of keyword stuffing and portal-era clutter. This "way of calculate" (the grammatical roughness adds to the garage-lab authenticity) became Google’s killer advantage: ranking wasn’t about who shouted loudest, but who was vouched for by the network. Of course, the irony is baked in: once you make "importance" computable, people will game it. The circular system doesn’t just measure culture; it reshapes it.