After doing a little patent research, the research returned a little information about how the technology buzz of PageRank is actually not owned by Google.
So who owns the technology behind the big Google Search? Stanford University. (Patent #6,285,999)
The patent details show it was filed in 1998 which does seem wrong to me, but the earlier date shows it was registered in 1991.
Quite interesting to me that Google would base their entire search market on a key element that they do not actually own themselves. It may have been conformed into their own patent, but the original idea behind it belongs to Stanford. Bearing in mind that Larry Page did co-author the patent, it still does not belong to Google.

June 16th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Interesting… Stanford ought to take it back.
Carmelo Lisciotto
June 17th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Well, Stanford actually owns it…so there’s nothing they need to take back.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Hmmm….interesting fact.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:35 am
Thanks for the head up. Otherwise I will assume forever pagerank is belong to Larry