"But how will Google ever make money? There's the rub." | Hacker News Reader

"But how will Google ever make money? There's the rub."

businessweek.com

101 pointsjasonlbaptiste27 comments

Now, of course, when there's a web site that is good but un-monetized, the answer to that question is "Google ads."

Nobody has mentioned it yet, but this seems most relevant now considering how much people make the same claims about lack of business models (and refusal to use the most obvious ones) for Twitter and Facebook.

Sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term gain worked great for Google. Its unlikely, but seems possible that either twitter or facebook could be the next to come up with a new and improved way to convert activity -> money.

We'll see in a few years who is/isn't eating their words about those companies not focusing on revue soon enough.

I'm impressed that they had 100 people including 30 PhDs at year 2.

That was just the research staff. :<)

Wow, this is a great find. I bet whoever wrote it painfully had to swallow his words as the years passed and Google became what it is today. It just shows that with the right strategy and ideas, any startup can unsettled an established field and come out tops.

    > I bet whoever wrote it painfully had to swallow his words...
                                                      ^^^

her words, that is [it's by Kalpana Mohan] http://www.kalpanamohan.org/

and she doesn't seem to be particularly ashamed of her words: the article is listed in her list of writing samples: http://www.kalpanamohan.org/writing_samples.shtml

Wait, even Google was admitting that they were sacrificing short-term revenue for long-term gain. Why should she have to eat her words?

It's very clear that the founders had to be talked into advertising only after the search appliance failed. (I'm almost positive only RedHat actually purchased one of the damn things, which makes sense since PageRank/BackRub isn't going to help you find Word documents in an intranet.)

    > Why should she have to eat her words?

I didn't say that, the parent of my first comment did:-)

They had text-based ads back then, they even mention it in the article.

The critique the author was leveling was that they were resisting /banner/ ads, and therefore putting their scruples ahead of good sense. Definitely seems silly in hindsight.

I don't have a problem with what she wrote. She acknowledged that Google was successful in terms of market share.

She was just questioning their refusal to run certain ads. Adwords had been implemented, but Google was making more money off of customizing intrasite search tools for large corporations.

Sure, you can blame her for not seeing adwords as being disruptive and predicting a potential for huge profits. But it is so much easier to discern a disruptive technology as being successful once it starts making large amounts of money.

I very much doubt whether the author had to swallow her own words a few years later. Google’s business model was awfully hazy about the time the article was written. The founders were clueless just as much as the author was about how they were going to scale the monetization. The two Stanford alums certainly did not foresee Google as what it evolved into a few years later.

  > That potent duo has collectively bet $25 million on the still-private company.

Back when 2-year-olds with $25M raised could reasonably be guessed to be public. Different times...

Before launching a freelance writing career in January 2000, Kalpana was a software developer at IBM for ten years. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Chennai (India), a Diplome Superieur in French from the Alliance Francaise and an M. S. in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

I found this on her homepage, kinda interesting that she developed software at IBM for 10 years before she found her calling in writing.

After noting the date on the article (actually, the quote pulled for the title pretty much gives it away), I was expecting to laugh a bit at the fools who didn't foresee how profitable Google would become.

Except, reading the article the concerns still make a lot of sense. It's still shocking that little text ads next to searches are worth billions of dollars, if you momentarily set aside the fact that you happen to live in a world where it's true.

For those of you old enough to remember that long ago time, did any of you honestly imagine Google becoming anywhere near as successful as it has become?

I was working as a developer at Lycos at the time (1998-1999), and we were constantly being pressured by sales to put bigger banner ads all over the place.

We set up one of the first (maybe the first? i don't know) web usability labs with eye-tracking, and we saw how no one paid any attention to the big graphics. They focused like a laser on the most boring part of the page, the text, because they knew that was the stuff we weren't trying to trick them into looking at.

It was totally counter-intuitive, so we screamed from the mountaintop that we couldn't keep putting bigger ads everywhere, they were totally useless. But sales drove the company, and that's what the advertisers, our "customers" wanted.

So Google destroyed Lycos, because they listened to their engineers and not their sales people.

"But Brin says he isn't worried: "When somebody searches for 'cancer,' should you put up the site that paid you or the site that has better information?" Brin is betting better information will win the day. "

Sad that the answer now is 'both', which to un-savvy Internet users sometimes means the paid placement is the one they see first and think Google is serving as the top ranking site.

No, the answer is not both.

Google has organic results and ad results, they are clearly distinguished in the UI and are generated by two distinct systems.

Whether the distinction in the UI is clear or not depends on how much experience you have with it. For me and presumably you, who have been using Google dozens of times a day for ten years, it's crystal-clear. For my neighbors who go to the locutorio down the street to use the internet because they don't have computers, it's not clear at all, according to some studies I can't be bothered to dig up right now.

I was pretty convinced this was the dumbest guy on earth, or a fellow suffering from traumatic brain injury with a bad editor, until I checked the date.

Yeah, I had the same experience. Strikes me that in the end, googles 'purity' has paid off!

hrm that post was a good BUI (browsing under the influence) test...it took me about 3 paragraphs before I had to check the date on the article. time for bed I think.

I didn't have to go that down. The third sentence reads 'Two-year-old Google'.

nice find.

Who is voting comments like this up? Not offense lakeeffect but typically a short comment like this that doesn't add to the discussion is either ignored or voted down. What gives?

It would seem that the slow creep of the Digg/Reddit effect is beginning to surface. It may simply be me but the articles on here are beginning to lose some of the technical/interesting nature and starting to turn into broader, general interest pieces.

ROFLcopter. Really funny to see punditry fail epically.

I love how HN is full of reflexive down-voters. What, you're pundit fans?

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