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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Google didn't start advertising until a couple of years after it was released. Advertising is very much its core now but it wasn't always that way.

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Google was incorporated in September 1998. They closed their A round in June 1999. AdWords launched in October of 2000, but they were selling ads through sales people for quite a while before that. Selling ads was always the plan from day 1.

Yeah but Larry Page & Sergey Brin developed PageRank in 1996.

Yes, as an academic research project. We can quibble over what it means to be "released", but the main point is that when it came time to try to monetize the technology, it was advertising from day 1. No other revenue-generation model was ever tried, or even seriously considered.

It was always in the long term plan though. Maybe not at the very beginning when Google ran their index out of a dorm room, but ads as monitization must have been the plan very early on, even if it took some time to work out the implementation.

In the beginning, Google’s founders said

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users

> For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

And most importantly

> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

I think especially the last statement shows very well that they were ideologically opposed to advertisement-funded search engines.

Source: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

In no way. The last statement very clearly is ambiguous, and does not preclude the creation of ad-driven revenue. They are in fact saying, "These are the problems with current ad-driven search services" and very heavily implying "we're going to do it differently."

> Google didn't start advertising until a couple of years after it was released.

How was Google making a living before advertising?

> Advertising is very much its core now but it wasn't always that way.

What was its core prior to advertising? I mean a money-making core.

> How was Google making a living before advertising?

It wasn't. Every search engine at the time had struggled to make money. It wasn't until Google "borrowed" pay-per-click auction bidding from Overture that advertising became their focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing#Patent...

I suspect they'd planned to roll out enterprise products. (You know - "the box" - like they did in Silicon Valley). That business started later (circa 2002):

https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html

But, by that stage, their ad revenue was killing everything.

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