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Google's first press release
- daleharvey 17y agoback in the days when you mentioned being on the board of webvan with pride
- dotcoma 17y agoand eToys, @Home, WebMD...
- josefresco 17y agoWebMB failed?
- prakash 17y agoInteresting, Sequoia & KPCB started in 1972.
- tsally 17y agoWow, a valuation of several billion? What a joke. They have no revenue stream, they're just giving away search for free. I don't see how this startup could ever be successful.
- NathanKP 17y agoYour point is obvious: Twitter could very well be the next Google. But back to the original article, all I have to say is that Google sure has changed a lot since those early days. ;)
- igorgue 17y agoIs there a "next Google", I don't think so
- adrinavarro 17y agoNobody thought so when Google started!
- unalone 17y agoNot a "next Google", but certainly another site that'll be as big as Google. As I've said before, my money is on Facebook. People my age use it like it's the Internet. To them, that's all there is. And they click its ads.
- dcurtis 17y agoFacebook is already there. What makes you think they click ads? I've heard the opposite.
- unalone 17y agoI don't think they click ads, I see friends checking out ads all the time. Particularly music ads. I'd imagine that it's not just a small-time thing, considering they're in the green now, but perhaps that money's coming from something else. Their ads are also a lot better than they were a year ago. They target more effectively, within reason. (My ads are screwy since I list no information about myself, but they used to try and sell me Arrested Development t-shirts and they almost succeeded on multiple occasions.)
- rokhayakebe 17y agoAlmost selling is not selling.
- unalone 17y agoI clicked the ad. I didn't buy the shirts, because last year was the year I grew out of buying t-shirts.
- andreyf 17y agoTwitter could very well be the next Google Even in 1998, Google provided a lot more value to users than Twitter ever will.
- indiejade 17y agoI think the point is to provide value to the investors. In either case, I disagree; Twitter provides all kinds of valuable information to very specific groups of people.
- andeka 17y agoNot to mention the problem of search has already been mostly solved by yahoo ,webcrawler, and altavista. It's good enough.
- maukdaddy 17y agoYou forgot hotbot!
- timr 17y agoThe problem with your comment is that nine out of ten times, it's actually correct.
- tsally 17y agoActually, I would imagine the odds are worse than that. Not all startups give away their product for free, and I'm guessing the failure rate is higher for those that do. But I don't see the problem with that. Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially. If somebody wants to swing for the fences, I don't think anybody should stop them. It's not the business model I would choose, but I certainly admire those that do.
- samg 17y ago"Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially." Why? I can think of plenty of software companies that changed the world with a paid product (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
- diN0bot 17y agofor some reason i feel more fuzzy inside thinking about the companies that change the world with free software, free as an ideal, with $$ secondary and on a sliding scale. i mean fuzzy as a human being rather than investor (although investors are also human beings).
- Timothee 17y ago"Google, a start-up dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web" Google is one of these less common start-ups who started doing one thing and ended up successful (to this day) with that specific idea. Yes, they extended their reach a lot, but the core is still the same as on the first day.
- dcurtis 17y agoNot really. Google is an advertising company now. When they started, they had no idea that's what they would become. Search is being leveraged for eyeballs to sell advertising space. Google still does search, but it's business has nothing to do with search directly.
- paul 17y agoThat's like saying that Walmart's business is cash registers. If I could aquire either Google's search business, or their ad business, I would take search, no question. The ad part could be rebuilt on search, but the opposite is not true.
- dcurtis 17y agoSearch isn't a business. It's just a technology they developed. If Google hadn't found their advertising business, they would have failed. You don't want Google's search technology because it will make you money. You want it because it has brand value and lots and lots of users that you want to leverage to make money using some other business. Walmart's business is selling merchandise. The fact that they have to be experts at building construction so they can make stores to sell merchandise is just as secondary as Google's search business. Would you rather have Walmart or their real estate?
- stanleydrew 17y agoIt's more like saying NBC is an advertising company. No, they create content and sell ads beside it. Google gives us great search results and sells ads beside them.
- euroclydon 17y ago"PageRank is computed by solving an equation of 500 million variables and two billion terms." Does it take 500 million variables to compute my Pagerank of 3 when there are only 32 sites that link to it? How many of those 500 million variables are 0 or null?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 17y agoPagerank is a funny algorithm, think of it as a problem in gravitation, every page affects the pagerank of every other page. You compute the equilibrium and then normalize the results. There are a bunch of optimizations that you can apply in order to speed things up bit it is still quite computationally expensive.
- ludwig 17y agoFor an overview of PageRank, you should check out http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html
- hooande 17y agoDid they really list the "I'm feeling lucky button" as a time saving feature in their first press release? I've spent a lot of time writing documents like this recently and I can only imagine how people would scold me for including a such a minor detail in a press release.
- ugh 17y agoAhem. The “I’m feeling lucky button” might be a minor detail today but it for sure wasn’t then. Certainly not the thing to mention first (it isn’t) but considering the very narrow and minimalist scope of Google (then) nothing minor. This is, however, quite a boilerplate press release. A [verb] B. X says [boss]. Boring. If you know one you know them all.
- kierank 17y agoBear in mind the time it would take to load the results page on a dialup connection.
- NathanKP 17y agoIs somebody eventually going to notice the misspelling in the title of this item and correct it? ;)
- NathanKP 17y agoGood, it got taken care of.