The next Google?

The collaboration between Yahoo! and Microsoft is spawning a lot of articles about the coming duopoly in search (since the Yahoo! Microsoft deal is for 10 years, we're talking 10 year horizon times). But this got me to thinking: when did people realize Google was something big? I realized Google was something big (for me personally since I'm a data junkie) after being pointed to it from this article in Salon in December of 1998. I became a Google evangelist. Initially most people thought my enthusiasm was a bit strange, at that point there were a dozen search engines, and all of them were pretty much crap. Of course once anyone used Google they never touched anything else again (to be fair, it took a little while for Google's indexing to overtake all other search engines, so there was some utility in checking the others for a bit). But when ...