Google is thirteen today...back in 1998 when the site was still hosted at http://google.stanford.edu, Keith Dawson gave the search engine its first online coverage in English on the fondly remembered Tasty Bits From the Technology Front.

This site, one of the few rigorous academic research projects on Web searching, presents a demonstration database -- only 25M documents -- that already blows past most of the existing search engines in returning relevant nuggets. Google employs a concept of Page Rank derived from academic citation literature. Page Rank equates roughly to a page's importance on the Web: the more inbound links a page has, and the higher the importance of the pages linking to it, the higher its Page Rank.