The Google Algorithm: 400 Million Variables

A century ago (well, ok, 1999) an article on Larry Page and Sergey Brin's new company described the nascent Google as a search engine that (gasp) just searches. Credit Adam Feuerstein, and the Internet Archive for bringing an old snippet of web history to light. Feuerstein's article noted how Excite, Infoseek, and Yahoo shifted from being search engines to portal models. This was two years before Terry Semel came on board with Yahoo, three and a half years before search became more of a Yahoo focus. Google went the other way. It focused on search only. It was a tough concept to here