Aaron Swartz‘ Google Weblog points at Bradford Delong‘s coverage of a talk that Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, gave recently.

Whew. Never typed so many URLs in a single sentence . Anyway, here’s the important part:

It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web – build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative.

Well, buying Blogger – and accepting update pings from other weblogging software – means they’ll now have a ready-made annotation system, with millions of people ready (and some even paying) to annotate the web for them. So that’s what they had in mind all along…

Update: Aaron updated his post to link back here… and Boing Boing also picked this up. Thanks, guys! Must be something to it…