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Trying to tie Google to one single grant doesn’t make sense, nor does associating the market cap of that company to that one grant make sense. Google owes far

Trying to tie Google to one single grant doesn’t make sense, nor does associating the market cap of that company to that one grant make sense. Google owes far more to TCP/IP research from DARPA than that particular library grant. But even then, the meta point is that you need lots of research pushing forward all edges of knowledge. It is very rare that any single grant can result in a massive successful business at this point. Pushing computing forward needs constant research in all directions to push forward hardware, networks, security, power conservation/generation, algorithms, storage, etc, etc.

ellen364 2y ago
The grandparent article claims that Page and Brin were paid by NSF, working on DLI projects while researching PageRank and that the equipment for their prototype crawler was partly paid for by DLI. If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.