Seriously. This article was published a year before Maps existed. Less than a month after the Gmail beta started. Facebook was less than six months old.
This was all seven years ago! How times have changed.
What's really crazy for me is that I've been at my current startup for over half of that time span, and that I've been into Rails almost the full span.
That argument didn't make a lot of sense then either. The specific algorithms that Google had patented gave it a runaway lead in implementing the kind of index that we now recognise as a crucial element of relevance. Anyone with knowledge of the domain could see that this was a revolution.
Even odder is that there's no mention in the piece about the long-raging battle with Yahoo over the Overture ad-bidding IP, a huge achilles heel for Google at the time which somehow just melted away 10 days before the IPO (but 4 months after this article).
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It's amazing to think that this was only a handful of years ago.