Jonathan does a bit of patent research and look what he found!

The Page Rank technology(or algorithm whatever) is not owned by Google but Stanford University!
It is patented to Stanford byPatent No 6,285,999.

He writes that though Larry Page co-authored the patent for the algorithm, it does not belong to Google. I think this is a remarkable piece of information. Kudos to Jonathan.

He says -

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.