This is a cool article. It helps explain what how people approached the web abs search before Google, which I know little about, and in a way explains Google's rise (without ever mentioning it).

Seen today, it's remarkable how human these early search engines were. For example, Yahoo:

> Yahoo! works like this: First, the URLs of new Web sites are collected. Most of these come by email from people who want their sites listed, and some come from Yahoo!'s spider – a simple program that scans the Web, crawling from link to link in search of new sites. Then, one of twenty human classifiers at Yahoo! looks the Web site over and determines how to categorize it.

Or Oracle:

> Already, more than 100 person-years have been spent building ConText's database of knowledge. To do so, Oracle has employed dozens of "lexicographers," a lofty title for what are often college interns who do the necessary legwork. "We've sent people to grocery stores, to scientific conferences, even sex shops," said Wical, with a touch of amazement at the resources Oracle can marshal. There, the lexicographers identify the subfields of metallurgy, for example, or the types of pornography, and then incorporate the results into ConText's ontology.

Reading through these and other search engine ideas helps illustrate what set PageRank apart -- nothing listed here hits on the core idea of organizing pages by their relations/links to other pages. Instead, everything is about looking at the content of the page itself and figuring out where it fits. Viewing the internet as a basically relational object seems to have been a big step to take, and perhaps required looking at the internet as its own new thing instead of a souped up library or set of TV channels.