Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like

Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out. It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.