> Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated Hmmm, no. Altavista was the go-to search engine at the time (

> Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated Hmmm, no. Altavista was the go-to search engine at the time (launched 1995), and was a crawler (i.e. not a curated catalog/directory) based search. Lycos predates that but had keyword rather than natural language search. Google didn't launch until 1998.