From the archive: John Naughton gives Google its first mention in the Observer

For no other reason than it’s a lazy Sunday morning, I was browsing back through the Guardian.co.uk archive to see when the first mention of Google was in the Guardian and Observer. I should have guessed; it was the ever-perceptive John Naughton who got to the punch first, writing in the Observer on Sunday March 14 1999.

His column that morning was a complaint about “bloated and vulgar” portals, and he made a very perceptive comment that many in our business still forget today, more than nine years on:

“The Net is all about something quite, quite different - namely individuals choosing what they want, and only what they want.”

Amen to that, again.

He also thought Yahoo was going to the dogs, and that Google would eat its lunch - until it went public too.

“Before it became a business going nowhere, Yahoo! was called ‘Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. Dave (Filo) and Jerry (Yang) were graduate students at Stanford who had the idea of making a directory of the burgeoning Web. Now they’re the billionaire owners of a plonking great virtual billboard with en-suite directory services.

Still, maybe Dave and Jerry will appreciate the irony of being wiped out by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two more Stanford graduates armed with a great idea and a wacky name. Google (www.google.com) indexes Web pages using an ingenious algorithm which ranks a site on the basis of who links to it. It’s a kind of automated peer-review of the kind that created the software on which the Net runs. Google is still in Beta form but works a treat, so it’ll probably be okay until Sergey and Larry float the company and get wiped out by the next pair of kids in the queue. On balance, it’s safer to invest in railways.”

Only on that last point can we see Naughton’s not entirely right. Yet.