Coincidences that made Google successful

shuzak.com

4 points·python_kiss··6 comments

Alternate premise: businesses that survive and thrive are simply the ones that avoided really dumb mistakes. http://www.insearchofstupidity.com/ I loved this book.

Good point! But I feel that most businesses attribute much of their fortune simply to coincidences. Randomness is a sign of complexity beyond human comprehension. We like to think we have control over our "destiny" but sometimes that just isn't the case.

The fact that the Banner market advertising collapsed is beside the point. Little guys could never afford banner advertising in 1999, as Yahoo's minimum cost was something like $10,000.

Google offered something which little guys could afford, was more relevant to readers, and attracted higher clickthroughs, so Google's Adsense would have done very well even if it did compete with Doubleclick in 1999.

To use a cliche, Adsense gets the "long tail" of advertising.

Also is there any evidence that Google picked up lots of out of work engineers after the Bubble? On the contrary Google seems to have attracted people away from other companies.

John Battelle's book had some really good stories that have stuck with me. How does "The Google Story" compare?

Yeah, I read both these books before writing this article. "The Google Story" is history of Google while "The Search" is really a history of search itself. Between the two, I would recommend "The Search" since it covers a larger spectrum, and is written more recently.

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