Imagine it's 1998. Google doesn't exist yet. Would Larry Page and Sergey Brin have added their big idea to this spreadsheet? My argument is that if you have any idea that's worthwhile, you're not going to publicize it. It might make sense to get feedback from a few friends. But you don't want potentially dozens of other people trying to execute it before you have had a chance to. Brin and Page are good examples of the fact that ideas in themselves can be extremely valuable and are worth guarding.
Who's technical brilliance? Sergy and Brin's got them a better search engine, but wasn't it the AdWords idea that originated at Goto.com that got them to the Google they are today?
Adwords without Pagerank is useless. The pay per click and auction mechanisms for Adwords are innovative in a sense, but Adwords is not successful because of its technical implementation. Adwords are what people pay for in a literal sense, but the source of Google's money is their search implementation.
EDIT: At this point their brand is also a source of Google's money. Today you need both to compete in search.
What was their big idea in 1998? Search .. Not a billion dollar winner. They only really won after seeing Overture and saying "Damn, we could do way better than those ideala! clowns"
This isn't quite correct. Google may have the best search right now, but its competitors could be just as good and it would still take us a while to find out. That's what happens with momentum. Here's an example: in September 2009 Microsoft released a free anti-virus that was at least as good as its competitors [1]. I'd say its just now getting some traction (and that's with Microsoft promoting it). A small company would take much longer to get traction.
Why do you think no one else can get search right? Have you used other search engines recently? Years ago Google had better results but now I don't really notice a difference in the quality of my results.
oh yes I remember that story.
It seems they approached Digital Equipment Corporation to sell it to them for $1M and, they refused so these guys went ahead with their own search engine.
Google wasn't an obvious success in the beginning.
My take on this is.
If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.
If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.
1) I think the actual story has elements of both variants--keeping an idea secret until execution, as well as executing on it and improving the idea.
If PageRank was closely guarded in any way, it could have been so that Page and Brin could submit their research paper about it to SIGIR--at which point it would be public. On the other hand, Page and Brin hosted the search engine for anybody to use.
2) As an aside, assuming the page below is the actual paper, does it mean Larry and Brin already have funding at the time they were writing it up? It mentions that users should try the search engine out at google.stanford.edu, but supposedly, it was their first investor who named Google.
