At 13:45 in this interview from 2003 with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, you can listen to them try to explain idempotentence on the air to Terry Gross and her NPR audience:
And in 2005 Google came up with Google Accelerator, which has shown many sloppy programmer what happens when you use HTTP method which is supposed to be idempotent—GET—for others purposes. What happened that GA crawled all the links it found for prefetching and some of them were "delete" links in admin interfaces.
I think that was the biggest push not to use GETs to modify data :)
http://www.npr.org/2003/10/14/167643282/google-founders-larr...