"Over the course of that two years Page and Brin had figured out Backrub's applicability to web search, failed to license the technology to Excite or Altavista, and had founded their own company."
I still remember the days when Altavista was the very best at Web search, and Excite had some features that made it worth checking as a plan B. It was near the end of the two years described in the excerpt when I started noticing Backrub regularly crawling my site, which used to rely primarily on Yahoo for online search referrals. I became a Google user as soon as the Web crawling from Google identified a site I could visit to see the sender of the Web crawler in action. I became hooked almost immediately, and started telling my friends about Google in online forums as I discovered more and more pleasantly surprising highly relevant results from searches I did. Too bad for Altavista and Excite that neither company grabbed PageRank and other Google technologies when they had the chance.