[Colin Dunstan]

Found this inconspicuous paper today by two, at that time, inconspicuous students: The Anatomy of a Search Engine

Some quotes from this paper (which btw dates around 1998 me thinks) you should think about for a minute:

The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/

as of now, Google knows 4,285 million pages, an insignificant increase by 17,754 percent

With better encoding and compression of the Document Index, a high quality web search engine may fit onto a 7GB drive of a new PC.

Does that mean I can fit more than five 'Googles' on my iPod?

Simple experiments indicate PageRank can be personalized by increasing the weight of a user's home page or bookmarks.

Perhaps privacy issue made this impossible so far.

A Web search engine is a very rich environment for research ideas.

...and for earning a buck or two...

...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Now, THIS is funny. Does Google Adwords ring a bell?

So we are optimistic that our centralized web search engine architecture will improve in its ability to cover the pertinent text information over time and that there is a bright future for search.

And bright it was indeed.