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It was always in the long term plan though. Maybe not at the very beginning when Google ran their index out of a dorm room, but ads as monitization must have been the plan very early on, even if it took some time to work out the implementation.


In the beginning, Google’s founders said

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users

> For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

And most importantly

> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

I think especially the last statement shows very well that they were ideologically opposed to advertisement-funded search engines.

Source: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html


In no way. The last statement very clearly is ambiguous, and does not preclude the creation of ad-driven revenue. They are in fact saying, "These are the problems with current ad-driven search services" and very heavily implying "we're going to do it differently."




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