In the mid-1990s, I worked in the Marketing Department at BT in Leeds.
We were based at Butts Court at the time, and one of my mates there was Jason, better known as “Caratacus”.
For some reason, the two of us had got into the habit of thinking up questions during the morning. Not useful questions, necessarily, just odd little things we suddenly wanted answers to.
Who was that actor in that film? Where did a certain phrase come from? Who sang a particular song? What was the capital of somewhere obscure? The sort of thing that would now be settled in about four seconds on your phone, before anyone had even finished arguing about it.
But this was the mid-90s. The internet existed, technically, but not in any useful way for two lads sat in an office in Leeds trying to settle a lunchtime curiosity.
So we had our own system.
At lunchtime, we’d nip round the corner to Waterstones and start looking through the books until we found the answer.
Reference books, film books, dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias, whatever looked like it might do the job. We didn’t buy them, obviously. We just used Waterstones as a sort of analogue search engine with nice carpets.
And the thing is, it worked.
Ask a question. Search the available information. Find the most likely source. Check the answer. Report back with entirely unearned confidence.
Basically, Jason “Caratacus” and myself invented Google a couple of years before Google officially existed.
Admittedly, our version involved walking around the corner, manually browsing shelves, and trying not to look like we were treating a bookshop as a free research department.
But the core concept was there.
So yes, I’m not saying Larry Page and Sergey Brin stole our idea.
I’m just saying that if they’d been in Waterstones in Leeds in about 1996, they might have seen the future.
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