Google's core beginning was PageRank (under license from Stanford), without which it would've been no better than similar offerings at the time. Additionally, t

Google's core beginning was PageRank (under license from Stanford), without which it would've been no better than similar offerings at the time. Additionally, their approach to setting up their equipment and making use of cheap gear and managing said cheap gear probably gave them a leg up...something they still do today at scale. So, no, you can't really make that analogy. Facebook was a tech company specifically, and not a company using tech, because the entire product was devoted to rapidly filling social profiles and spinning up the microsites that were user accounts, mining those accounts for information, and then integrating as a platform for advertisers and game developers. None of that tech is really stuff they could've outsourced and still had a business--they couldn't have just white-labeled MySpace for example and gotten away with it.