The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Brin and Page. Not only for the historical value of changing the world, and for the fact that i

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Brin and Page. Not only for the historical value of changing the world, and for the fact that it's very interesting and readable; It has personal value to me: the first CS paper I've ever read and it inspired me and changed the course of my life, literally. Also, it has some very amusingly naive (in hindsight) stuff in it, like: "Google does not have any optimizations such as query caching, subindices on common terms, and other common optimizations. We intend to speed up Google considerably through distribution and hardware, software, and algorithmic improvements. Our target is to be able to handle several hundred queries per second" http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html