[visarga]

If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search.

By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL

[dredmorbius]

Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

It was anticipated in the protocol, that's what ? is for.