[enki]

even if you had had the same brilliant insights into the graph structure of the web when they did, you most likely would have failed because it was prohibitively expensive (the cost in the article is probably underestimated by orders of magnitude). it's simply a fact that:

1) getting the data, 2) computing the eigenvector of a large matrix, 3) and serving that data to users, wasn't cheap in 1998. it's comparatively dirt cheap today.

not to diss larry and sergey's impressive achievement - they were brilliant and they pulled it off - but i think back then game was so costly that a lot of brilliant people never made it to the starting line. it's cool to see that it's become a much more level playing field now. i'm curious what cool stuff we missed out on because of people who didn't make it to the starting line!