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Comment by bertr4nd | Hacker News Reader

Something I don’t understand in this article is the “People won’t understand your ideas if they’re any good.” Like, the idea behind Google is, “Let’s make another search engine, but make it really good.” That’s not a crazy idea, is it? Was the problem that VCs thought existing engines were good enough and that Google’s wouldn’t be enough better to be worthwhile?

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At the time that Google entered the market, there were at least 16 other search engines in existence [1] and all Google did was search. They had the smallest front page of any of the search engines at the time. It was very refreshing, and Page Rank turned out to be incredible at returning results but the "making money" thing was still very unclear at the time.

I seem to recall they wanted to sell out to Yahoo for $10 million (1999? 2000?), but apparently, that was too much for Yahoo's liking.

[1] I only know this because I still have the bookmarks from the time on my machine. Back in 1996, I wrote a metasearch engine that queried 16 other search engines (http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html).

1998, and $1 million: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-...

Four years later Google turned down a $3 billion offer from Yahoo, asking for 5.

At the time, people were thinking in terms of portals and in my recollection, it was clear to anyone how to extract money from those ( ads ).

In the late 90's starting a new search engine would have seemed crazy to many. It was a competitive market, there were major incumbents, profit potential seemed low, and it wasn't obvious that search could be significantly improved upon.

It's kind of funny isn't it- starting a search engine in a really competitive market is crazy! Yet actually, I think that's a hell of a lot more enticing than starting a search engine today, where there's no competitive market, there's just Google.

The crazy idea was using commodity servers and set your infrastructure up so that you can just let them die and keep going.

AltaVista, for example, ran on a couple of pretty beefy Alpha servers at the time.

Could you explain more? I'd love to hear about this

Search is a very intense application - battering hard drives and memory until it dies, so being able to buy cheap PCs made google financially feasible and scalable. Google wrote great software to run on top of cheap, commodity hardware.

The crazy idea behind Google was that they had no feasible plan for monetization.

There was an early and obvious insight that fast and simple search would win, but ads at the time were gif banners and flash animation.

They tried adwords, and it worked.

AdWords dates back to 2000-2001. At the time they IPOed in 2004 they had 90%+ of revenue coming from advertising. They didn't adopt cookie based tracking (DoubleClick) until the 2007-2008 recession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...

That's not really an idea though, that's a goal, the idea is the description of how you will reach your goal, which in Google's case was PageRank.

I was being glib in the description but it’s not like PageRank is a crazy idea either, is it?

The reason I’m prodding at this is because there are different ways in which someone can fail to understand the value of an idea. The value proposition for Google doesn’t seem far-fetched at all, but I could believe that investors simply didn’t believe PageRank was a good enough idea to displace then market leaders.

first of all from our viewpoint PageRank doesn't seem like a crazy idea, I suppose at the time it would have seemed not crazy but interesting and unproved, thus very risky.

Furthermore it is my experience that people sometimes do not understand the value proposition of even simple things if those things are new, the value of the new must be demonstrated and often overwhelmingly.

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