Last week, I rounded up some of the earliest reviews of Google–most of them positive, none of them predicting what would become of it over the next few years. Karen Wickre of Google saw the story and wrote to clue me in to a piece even earlier than any of the ones I found, which it rediscovered when putting together a tenth anniversary corporate timeline last year. Fittingly enough, it’s by search guru Danny Sullivan (now of Search Engine Land), and it appeared in the August 4th, 1998 issue of Search Engine Watch’s Search Engine Report newsletter:

So how about the results? I think many people will be pleased, especially for the ever-popular single and two-word queries. A search for “bill clinton” brought the White House site up at number one. A search for “disney” top-ranked disney.com, and sections within it like Disney World, the Disney Channel, and Walt Disney Pictures. Yet interesting alternative sites, such as Werner’s Unofficial Disney Park Links, also made it on the list.

Will Google be going commercial? [Co-founder Larry] Page has no opposition to it, but said there’s no particular hurry.

“We’re Ph.D. students, we can do whatever we want,” he said. And what they want is to find the right partners to let them focus on improving relevancy. “I’d like to build a service where the priority is on giving users great results,” Page said.

The whole thing is such an entertaining read that I’m tempted to quote it in its Google-related entirety, but go here to enjoy it.

 
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