Earlier quoted context omitted.
indeed this was itching me, too. I wonder how pagerank was influential to CS as a field? even mapreduce is more a rally clever technique than a boundary pushing or boundary identifying extension of the field. unlike, say, CSP --- which is missing in the list. still unlike the conciseness and structure of the list. it could evolve into a nice book :-D
If you haven’t read the pagerank paper, you should. It’s not an obvious thing. Agreed about map reduce though.
My understanding of the term "history of CS" would be "how CS evolved", as a field. How do we think about "processing 'data' with computers". what can we compute? what are limitations in how fast we can compute? how to we talk about and present algorithms, prescriptions for these computations? how do we talk about data and how we structure it (leading to SQL, and sgml/xml/JSON)?
Pagerank in contrast is a very specific type of breakthrough, a breakthrough for it's application domain. But it's not a breakthrough for how we compute or how we think about computation.
does that make sense?