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That wasn’t out of benevolence, that’s because they hadn’t discovered the ads business model yet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle now.

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They always knew.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

They're on record as talking about how Google has better results because it doesn't have ads.

At that time and it's what got them the market share. Once they achieved monopoly status "Don't be Evil" was quietly replaced by "You call that an acceptable margin?!"

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