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Comment by wallop | Hacker News Reader

Imagine it's 1998. Google doesn't exist yet. Would Larry Page and Sergey Brin have added their big idea to this spreadsheet? My argument is that if you have any idea that's worthwhile, you're not going to publicize it. It might make sense to get feedback from a few friends. But you don't want potentially dozens of other people trying to execute it before you have had a chance to. Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.

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Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.

They're probably one of the worst examples. It was technical brilliance, not their idea, that allowed them to succeed.

Who's technical brilliance? Sergy and Brin's got them a better search engine, but wasn't it the AdWords idea that originated at Goto.com that got them to the Google they are today?

Adwords without Pagerank is useless. The pay per click and auction mechanisms for Adwords are innovative in a sense, but Adwords is not successful because of its technical implementation. Adwords are what people pay for in a literal sense, but the source of Google's money is their search implementation.

EDIT: At this point their brand is also a source of Google's money. Today you need both to compete in search.

Good artists copy, great artists steal?

What was their big idea in 1998? Search .. Not a billion dollar winner. They only really won after seeing Overture and saying "Damn, we could do way better than those ideala! clowns"

It was April 1998, Google hadn't been incorporated yet (took until September), and Larry & Sergey did release their big idea: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

There were plenty of search engines in 1998. Larry and Sergey's implementation just happened to be much better.

The fact thats its 2010 and no one else can get search right shows its pure execution. Google just does it right and keeps doing it right.

Bing and Yahoo are both competent alternatives to Google in my experience.

This isn't quite correct. Google may have the best search right now, but its competitors could be just as good and it would still take us a while to find out. That's what happens with momentum. Here's an example: in September 2009 Microsoft released a free anti-virus that was at least as good as its competitors [1]. I'd say its just now getting some traction (and that's with Microsoft promoting it). A small company would take much longer to get traction.

[1] http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/main-test...

Why do you think no one else can get search right? Have you used other search engines recently? Years ago Google had better results but now I don't really notice a difference in the quality of my results.

which other search engines are you using?

I use Bing, Google, and Yahoo with good results. I occasionally use Cuil but its results are usually not very good.

google sucks now. all my results are from 4 years ago and are mostly SEO bullshit

As far as I can recall reading, they did go to a bunch of places to sell their idea. Needless to say, none of the companies took their idea seriously.

There's a difference between going to a potential investor in an attempt to sell your ideas, and putting it on the open internet for anybody to gank.

Well, yeah. But, did they go to yahoo to raise money for the company?

oh yes I remember that story. It seems they approached Digital Equipment Corporation to sell it to them for $1M and, they refused so these guys went ahead with their own search engine.

Google wasn't an obvious success in the beginning.

My take on this is.

If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.

If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.

1) I think the actual story has elements of both variants--keeping an idea secret until execution, as well as executing on it and improving the idea.

If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.

2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Great hackers see more solutions to big problems than they can ever possibly execute. Why hoard ideas?

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