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Comment by light_triad | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :)

You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.

"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)

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> Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :)

Around the dawn of YC, IIRC, when PG did the "summer founders" or something like that, a group of 4 of us Lisp hackers applied as a team. No response.

We were mostly in grad student-like lifestyle modes, and not tied down, were energetic, and already had various applicable experience.

But I think PG was mostly looking for barely-20 year-olds to drop out of college, rent an apartment in Harvard Square together, and sit around hacking in towels.

Since that's what he wrote in one article. Which I guess trumped the article in which he said Lisp hackers are great for startups.

Now his latest article says he's going after 14 and 15 year-olds. :)

I always wonder about the success rate of advice. Do we have any student from this talk of PG who succeeded later in life? Joined an ivy league school? Proceeded to create a startup? Had success with it?

Don’t get me wrong. This folklore is extremely important, if not just to raise the grades of one student. But as a founder, when I give advice, out of inflated ego generally, I also have vertigo from the height of everything that could go wrong about being mistaken about my advice.

I feel that worry too, but I can validate his advice, somewhat.

I'm 44 and spent most of my career working individually and with my closest friends on projects that felt interesting, and it went really well for us in all of the ways. I also met these friends at a selective school, though it was a state-funded high school (massacademy.org), not a university.

Also, someone once came to my very conventional elementary school in 5th grade on career day to talk about a very unconventional career path (being a full-time peace activist) and this had a huge impact on me, both because it validated activism as a career and perhaps more importantly because it validated not having a normal job.

Getting a very short lecture in school from an interesting non-teacher can be at least very memorable and perhaps life-changing.

> Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

(Excerpt from the “wear sunscreen” speech: http://plodplod.blogspot.com/2006/07/advice-like-youth-proba...)

But that's the thing. "Search" was not a great business problem. It still isn't. I used Google for years before their IPO and people were always like "how is this thing going to make money" and believe it or not there was a lot of skepticism even at IPO time that they even had a possible reasonable business model. (Same for Facebook at their IPO, too.)

Search is not a good business. Ad sales over top of search turned out to be. AdWords is the thing that catapulted Google towards (insane) profitability. And for the first few years, Google didn't really sell ads, or market themselves as even aiming to sell ads. But AdWords could only be successful because they had already captured the market on search, and so had a captive audience to show ads to (and relevance information based on their searches).

AdWords rolled out in 2000. Many of us had been using Google as a search engine since before the company had even been founded (1998).

Totally agree. What I mean is many research topics can be very interesting from a technical perspective but don't translate into solving problems that are frequent and important enough to build a business around. In the case of Search many business gurus didn't understand at the time that you can make a fortune with a free product. What matters is who has the traffic and who they're selling it to = eyeball meets ad. Page and Brin initially "expected that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" (foreshadowing). Also they tried to sell to Yahoo for $1M so it took time to see the full potential, as you describe.

When Google started, you didn't need a business model for a "dotcom" (as we called them, before "tech stocks" became the "tech" that we now call ourselves).

We already realized the necessity of finding information amongst the exponentially growing wealth of Web servers (sites).

And Google obviously worked much better than the existing crawler-based search indexes and curated directories.

And lots of people thought a "portal" was a good place to be, if you could manage it.

> And Google obviously worked much better than the existing crawler-based search indexes and curated directories.

Funny thing is I recall using Google from the very day I first saw it come across Slashdot -- probably late 1997 -- before they were incorporated even... but I also recall that at some point around 1999 I actually switched back to using AltaVista or something similar for a bit. Because I preferred the search results I got.

It was actually a more competitive situation than people might remember in hindsight.

The big difference is that Google made it through the .com crash filter better than anybody else. That and they kept the good will of their customers by keeping minimal and straightforward and (for a while) ad free.

I recall once google came on the scene I ditched altavista and never looked back. I was a teen but my recollection was that Google included the relevant paragraph of text from the page shown in in the search results whereas altavista showed one line that was often indecipherable gobbledygook - perhaps the page title matched a keyword - and it made it so much easier to scroll through ten results and identify the one that was the highest quality

Plus the no fast no clutter homepage for google compared to how many links can we fit in one screen for the portals

I switched to using Google as soon as I saw it in the late '90s, because of much more relevant hits ranked at/near top.

Maybe AltaVista improved after that, which could explain how the parent commenter could go back to it.

There was a brief window where AltaVista improved and I went back to it after being Google since 98. Probably only for a few months. I often preferred the query hints you could give it to get very specific output. No matter, they went out of business.

The turning point that brought me fulltime to Google from then on (until recently switching to Kagi) was when they started having almost live results. It's hard to remember or imagine but search indices were often days, weeks out of sync for critical things like news, etc and Google was really the first to fix that.

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