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Comment by prasadjoglekar | Hacker News Reader

In my living memory, Google has never NOT been an ad-company. They started with one exceptionally good product - search - and monetized it very well via ads.

As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.

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It was brief, but google did not sell ads from when they launched in 1998 until October 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

1998 is not outside "living memory"

May well be outside the GP's living memory, though. Further, they weren't really making any money at that point.

Didn't Google mostly live on VC money during that period? If they did I think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company. I think what made Google function for a long time after 2000 was the fact that they managed to keep their advertising business and their products fairly separate. The big downfall began when people like Ben Gomes lost to Venkataraman. Venkataraman who's now infamous for ruining both Yahoo and Google Search... But Venkataraman's recent "promotion" isn't exactly something that should bring us much hope though. Not considering that he's being replaced by an actual McKinsey spreadsheet.

> think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company

I don't think that's fair unless you can find something that says that was their intent (sibling posts in this thread claim there's actually evidence to the contrary). I don't see the problem with "startup trying to figure out a sustainable business" and leaving it like that. It's not like that's something unprecedented or even unusual.

I've mentioned this before, but in the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads. It was in their pitch deck.

Now, to which extent they REALLY wanted to do this, and REALLY impacted the day to day decision, I don't know. Neither if said pitch deck had other options.

I remember that time! Magical!

I also remember the IPO. Didn’t have any money at the time, but still wish I had invested… or gotten my parents to invest.

lol we’re old now dude. 1998 was 26 years ago. A lot of people on this site weren’t born yet.

Google has never not been an ad company, except for that brief period of time where they were talking about how a search engine that serves ads is working against its users interests. Then they needed money so they did it anyway.

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