Here’s a site about the olden days of Google when it was first introduced, and eerybody was using Altavista or HotBot as their search engine of choice.
It has a link to the Stanford research paper done by the founders of Google on how their search engine would work. Back in those days (1998), you couldn’t submit to Google: it would find you eventually by crawling the web.
The highest Page Ranks were amazing. No zero to ten. No, this went all the way to 11,589. That was the ranking of the Netscape Download page. Second was 10,717.70 for www.w3.org. (The average webpage was assigned the value of one.)
“My category is browser downloads and I want to outrank just one other site …”