https://www.rankdex.com/about.html

RankDex was established in 1996 by Robin Li who previously worked for Infoseek, an Internet search engine in the early years, as an engineer.

RankDex was the leading Internet search provider from 1996-2001 until Baidu was launched in China. RankDex was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing. Many experts and commentators are unaware that RankDex was cited in Lawrence Page’s patent application for Google PageRank as the first qualitative search engine (Patent number: US6285999 B1 entitled "Method for node ranking in a linked database.")