Hacker News Reader

>Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.

Sounds like a road map.

(Wikipedia)

But here we should remember what internet ads were like before the appearance of textual Google ads. They were image banners of standardized sizes, much more intrusive and way more pointless.

I think that depends on your definition of intrusive.

Prior to adwords, what was their business model?

Go.com w/ Overture, acquired by Yahoo - that had PPC offerings before Google even had a monetization strategy.

Did they have no road map to profitability before they just accidentally happened to turn on AdWords, which they had built for no reason?

Sorry, but did google run out of funding?