The story of Google is just when everyone concluded that a search engine would never make any money, everyone backed out of it, and Google walked into that vacuum and dominated.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.
Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.
Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.
Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.
Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.
To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.
Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.
Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate.