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Yep. Before AdWords, Google’s monetization strategy was fairly hand-wavy and hinged around licensing the tech to be a search provider for other websites. Once they realized how much money could be made by putting ads on searches, the rest is history.

I think the comment referred to Inktomi (that had just lost the search deal to Google,) not Yahoo.

How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that

If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that this is how the game is played