Pagerank was indeed a giant leap at the time, but some other things are frequently forgotten with that one-trick pony narrative. * Ownership structure - Google

Pagerank was indeed a giant leap at the time, but some other things are frequently forgotten with that one-trick pony narrative. * Ownership structure - Google's founders had the front to IPO with a structure that gave them complete control of the company (10:1 voting rights over ordinary shareholders). That alone is why they can make huge long-term bets, from GMail to Android to robotics, instead of dumping inventory on the last day of each quarter to appease Wall St. * Ads - Colossal ad revenue wasn't a guaranteed point on the trajectory from Pagerank and should therefore be considered as an independent innovation. They initially monetised with the search appliance for intranets and there was a time when they were considering a charging model for companies to use Google search. * Superior ops - Google had to scale like crazy. The early crawlers were supposedly using 25% of Stanford's bandwidth after much pleading with admins, and the scaling never ended. Other startups might have partnered with some giant hardware company or bought into various commercial Unix offerings, but Google's early team figured out how to operate and distribute giant data centres on budget.