It had been applied decades before through scientific paper references, as a measure to improve on the "number of references" metric, which is more easily gamed. References are more rarely circular (only same time in-preparations can form cycles, unlike web pages). I was sitting in a class about stationary processes in 1996 when the lecturer mentioned this (already old and well known at the time) use case as motivation.
Whatever AV implemented at the time, it was not on par.
Pagerank is essentially a “universal authority score” (in the HITS terminology), and it worked well because at the tine you didn’t have pages that were authority for one subject and spam for another. You do now - which is why pagerank is now one signal out of 200, even though it was sufficient on its own 20 years ago.
This of course was also at a time when "whitehouse.com" was a porn site.
In a way, it ranks a link by its own incoming links (which are ranked by their incoming links etc). It was possible to game AV by setting up 100 sites that points to your own.
In pagerank, you essentially had to convince already popular pages to link to yours.
For a while, google effectively had no spam, and AV had lots. Eventually, spammers learned to game pagerank; the arms race is still on.