You said "they struck oil with a new approach to search." I believe nobody, not even other search companies cared about the algorithm. The search engines did

You said "they struck oil with a new approach to search." I believe nobody, not even other search companies cared about the algorithm. The search engines did not want to buy PageRank (outright, not just license), not even for $1M. Not even during the Dot Com craze. Nobody wanted to improve search, in other words. That's what PG is writing about. Had Larry and Sergey received $1M, then I would agree that they would have struck it rich, and probably continued their doctorate studies. But instead they decided to build a company around it even though no other company believed they had anything worthwhile to, in the order of increasing significance, 1) purchase, 2) invest in, 3) license, or, most insulting of all, 4) not even pay their own employees to copy (at least not until 4-6 years later.) And yet, they decided to drop out of the best Graduate Computer Science program and try to start a great company because existing portals were not doing search well, and nor did they care. Only a long time later did Yahoo! decide to license Google search (nobody else did) and, only even later did Microsoft and Yahoo! started paying their own employees to clone Google's search tactics (as well as look and feel.)