2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler.
3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto.
4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun.
5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.)
6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon.
7. Sell search ads.
8. Profit!
Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.
"Build a search engine so good all nerds on the early Internet abandon AltaVista and switch to it, no marketing required."?
which?
But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.
Not at scale. In the 1980s, Stanford's biggest IP revenue came from FM synthesis for musical instruments. In 1991, Stanford started up the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. Offices were on Sand Hill Road, out by the venture capitalists. That worked out very well. Enough so that SMC became the tail that wagged the dog. But that's a long story.