The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I

The late 1990s and early 2000s was a silly time because of the portals. I worked for a search engine company that delivered search to a well-known portal and I can remember how much we despised what they did with our technology. Google was able to break out because they managed to retain great talent and was able to stay funded for a few critical years until their bets paid off. And they did so rather quickly. I can't help but feel that we're back to a variant of the portal mindset. Only now it is more about B2B and spying on users. And it doesn't feel like Google does anything out of passion anymore. There's really no race to perfect technology - just to be good enough to stay ahead of competition. The Google of old might have invested in image search to fulfil its potential. The Google of today probably sees it as waste of effort.