Unfortunately for my argument, my claim isn't founded on much beyond my gut feelings at the time. It would be easier to find articles that invalidate it. Certai

Unfortunately for my argument, my claim isn't founded on much beyond my gut feelings at the time. It would be easier to find articles that invalidate it. Certainly the ancient magazine article I mentioned (was it Discover? SciAm?) was a breathless story about boy genius graduate students and their breath-through page rank algorithm etc. The people around me (maybe bloggers, too?) seemed as, or more, interested in Google's simple 'noncommercial' design and use of the word 'googol', than in the accuracy of Google's results. On the plus side for my take, there's likely evidence that search users didn't consciously value search algorithms like they do now. In the 90s, people were mostly after 'total number of pages indexed'