Hey Gwern, love your writing :) > Google's innovation was discovering the ad auctions that turned their gushing red ink into gushing green ink. PageRank is a n

Hey Gwern, love your writing :) > Google's innovation was discovering the ad auctions that turned their gushing red ink into gushing green ink. PageRank is a nice idea, but I don't remember switching from Dogpile to Google and going 'oh my god! who are these Google people? They solved search. All the search engines I used before were not even worthy of the name!' I wouldn't call it so extreme as to redefine the entire category; I wouldn't call early Google even 10x better than its competitors. Maybe 2 or 3x better. I guess we may just have to agree to disagree here. I remember Google being a fairly revolutionary improvement over the competition. PageRank was definitely a fundamental, novel insight into the underlying structure of the internet. IMO it made a very big difference in the quality of their results, and their immunity from being gamed. > Had they not been fortunate enough to stumble across the right way to do ads, they would have been yet another casualty of the dot-com bubble - 'yeah, they did a nice job with $TECH, but everyone knows you can't simply scale and count on finding a revenue model later on, which is what all those dot-com bombs did. Eventually you run out of greater fools, you know. Too bad, I liked their site, among many others.' I do think you're right that their ad-auction model was also a deep fundamental insight and I maybe should have included that as well. But in my opinion both the ad-auction model and the PageRank algorithm are cut from the same cloth: Deep, fundamental technical insights into the underlying structure of the problem that solve it in a (metaphorically) closed-form way. I find this to be in stark contrast to say, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc...who had no deep insight into much of anything. Not to say that they weren't smart, and maybe had some insight into human behavior, but I think luck was a much, much bigger factor there than it was for Google.