Counting Clicks and Looking at Links (article on Google, 1998)

Best part of the article is at the end:

Will Google be going commercial? 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.

If you pay a visit, don't be frightened by the interface. One thing Google needs is a good facelift. Relevancy scores and other extraneous information can obscure the actual listings -- but I did say this was an experimental service, right?

"portal heaven"