Google's first press release
google.com
google.com
But back to the original article, all I have to say is that Google sure has changed a lot since those early days. ;)
As I've said before, my money is on Facebook. People my age use it like it's the Internet. To them, that's all there is. And they click its ads.
What makes you think they click ads? I've heard the opposite.
Their ads are also a lot better than they were a year ago. They target more effectively, within reason. (My ads are screwy since I list no information about myself, but they used to try and sell me Arrested Development t-shirts and they almost succeeded on multiple occasions.)
Even in 1998, Google provided a lot more value to users than Twitter ever will.
But I don't see the problem with that. Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially. If somebody wants to swing for the fences, I don't think anybody should stop them. It's not the business model I would choose, but I certainly admire those that do.
Why? I can think of plenty of software companies that changed the world with a paid product (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
Google is one of these less common start-ups who started doing one thing and ended up successful (to this day) with that specific idea. Yes, they extended their reach a lot, but the core is still the same as on the first day.
Google still does search, but it's business has nothing to do with search directly.
If I could aquire either Google's search business, or their ad business, I would take search, no question. The ad part could be rebuilt on search, but the opposite is not true.
You don't want Google's search technology because it will make you money. You want it because it has brand value and lots and lots of users that you want to leverage to make money using some other business.
Walmart's business is selling merchandise. The fact that they have to be experts at building construction so they can make stores to sell merchandise is just as secondary as Google's search business.
Would you rather have Walmart or their real estate?
The company has an advantage, and it's using it to help sell something. Of course if they didn't have adwords, I'm sure Google could have found other ways to make money from their search.
This is, however, quite a boilerplate press release. A [verb] B. X says [boss]. Boring. If you know one you know them all.
Does it take 500 million variables to compute my Pagerank of 3 when there are only 32 sites that link to it? How many of those 500 million variables are 0 or null?
You compute the equilibrium and then normalize the results.
There are a bunch of optimizations that you can apply in order to speed things up bit it is still quite computationally expensive.