page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable information for that page—the role of citations in academic publishing would also become pertinent for the research sergey brin a fellow stanford phd student would soon join pages research project nicknamed "backrub" together the pair authored a research paper titled "the anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine" which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the internet at the time