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BY Enrique Dans

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Let’s try a little thought experiment in technology-fiction: what would have happened if Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PageRank, back in 1998, had failed to attract its first investors? Google didn’t invent the search engine: there were plenty of them before, from AltaVista, Excite, Lycos or others who were counting words on pages and selling their results page to the highest bidder, to catalog or portal concepts such as Yahoo! or AOL, that attempted to capture the users’ attention as much as they could to be able to serve them advertising, the more the better. Imagine if these concepts would have gone the distance, and deprived us of the web that resulted from Google’s easy and efficient way of searching …

What did Larry Page and Sergey Brin realize?…