A decent short overview of how Google's advertising business evolved can be found at http://publishing2.com/2008/05/27/google-adwords-a-brief-history-of-online-

A decent short overview of how Google's advertising business evolved can be found at http://publishing2.com/2008/05/27/google-adwords-a-brief-history-of-online-advertising-innovation/ http://publishing2.com/2008/05/27/google-adwords-a-brief-his.... While there were some unexpected twists and turns, the timeline suggests that when this article was written, Google was already thinking about the ways it could adopt an ad model. As a side note, I'm not sure if this was posted as an ironic response to the growing bubble talk of the current boom but unlike in the late 90s, the challenge for most startups today is not finding a business model but rather achieving enough scale to apply one of the many proven business models successfully and sustainably.