One is reminded of Damien Hirst's famed retort to a critic who said "Well I could have pickled a shark" ... "But you didn't, did you. I did."

Well, I was a child in 1996, so probably not.

Tying relevancy to link frequency was definitely a novel idea at the time, even if it seems "obvious" or simple in retrospect.

Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today - you need something else. It was one of many possible ranking hacks, and one that worked at the particular time in that particular state of the web where nobody was gaming links because PageRank didn't exist yet. Maybe you could invent a good ranking algorithm for the modern internet, perhaps just the reciprocal of the number of ads on the page.

Unimportantly, it's named after Larry Page, not after the fact that it ranks pages.