A Bit of Search History
October 30, 2013
Will Oremus at Slate gives us a history lesson in, “Google’s Big Break.” Though back in 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin did indeed come up with the best approach to search the Internet had yet seen, their enterprise nearly collapsed for lack of one little detail: a way to monetize their service. Investors pressured the startup to embrace the day’s popular money-maker, banner ads. Oremus writes:
“They thought banner ads were ugly and distracting. Worse, banner ads took time to load, and Google’s founders possessed an almost religious devotion to efficiency and speed. In their seminal 1998 academic paper introducing the idea of Google, Page and Brin criticized advertising-funded search engines as ‘inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.'”
All true. Brin and Page found their alternative by peering at rival GoTo.com (later renamed Overture), whose founder had devised paid search to address the same problem. This approach reduced unsightly spam while more tightly targeting audiences for advertisers; it also switched from charging advertisers per page-view to charging per click-through. The solution was an improvement for both users and advertisers. No wonder Google could not resist incorporating the idea into its search engine, beginning in 2000 with the first version of AdWords. At the time, GoTo’s founder Bill Gross suggested a merger to the Googlers-in-chief, but they weren’t interested. Two years later, the refined version of AdWords took off, carrying Google to overwhelming success.
Charitably, Gross says Google did not “steal” his idea because he had not thought to patent it. Overture did file for certain peripheral patents, with which it was able to sue Google after the 2002 iteration of AdWords launched. (GoTo-turned-Overture was owned by Yahoo by then, which picked up a passel of Google stock for its litigative trouble.) Gross remains philosophical about the situation. The article concludes:
“Gross, for his part, seems comfortable, even happy, with how things turned out. . . . ‘I’m wildly proud of coming up with the paid-search model,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t know how big it was at the time.’ Besides, Gross says, if Google didn’t make billions with the pay-per-click auction model, it would have made its billions some other way. ‘I wish I had come up with the Google idea,’ he says. ‘The Google idea was the idea for organizing the world’s information. Mine was just an idea for making money.'”
“Just,” he says. It is refreshing to read about a business person who can take pride in his concept without bitterness at having had that concept profitably pilfered.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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