[1_800_UNICORN]

> Google’s core DNA is search and engineering, though some would say engineering that is driven by the economics of search, which makes it hard for the company to see the world through any other lens.

I would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.

[simonh]

Somebody says this on pretty much every thread about Google, it's the go-to 'smart' thing to say about Google.

Heres a list of advertising companies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_agencies

WPP Group is the biggest in the world. Does Google have the same DNA as WPP Group? Does that mean we can tell what Google will do by watching what WPP group does?

Google was an engineering and search company before they had any advertising whatsoever. There are just things about what Google did then, and do now, that pushed them into an advertising based revenue model.

Google's technology is based on gathering information about the structure of the web and user behaviour. That is their core competency, nobody does it better than them. They leverage that core competency, that killer unique advantage, to earn revenue through advertising. Is HBO's DNA advertising and subscriptions? Sounds like a magazine publisher to me, does HBO have the same DNA as Vogue Magazine or Time?

Yes understanding their revenue model can tell you useful things about the constraints on a company. It can tell you about the forces that act on them to direct their behaviour, but to say that it constitutes their DNA is to put the cart way out in front of the horse.

If Google finds a new revenue stream other than advertising, they will deploy their core competencies to exploit it, just as the carniverous ancestors of Panda Bears adapted to a herbivorous diet. Dont confuse ecological niche for innate nature.

[p0wn]

I think you're confusing an ad agency with what I'll refer to as an ad service.

An ad agency works with companies to produce ads. It does the concepting and production of ads(etc.).

An 'ad service'(unsure of proper name) provides the medium of which to display the ads. These include tv stations, google, youtube(owned by google), facebook, amazon, all those annoying ones in free mobile games etc.

There's a huge difference to what wpp and google provides. Google earns 90% of it's revenue(source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin... - i googled it) from ads.

That said I agree that just because google provides a platform for ads doesn't mean it's "dna" is based in advertising. It's a core component of the company, though, and drives everything else the company does.

[eterm]

Google didn't start advertising until a couple of years after it was released. Advertising is very much its core now but it wasn't always that way.

[lisper]

Google was incorporated in September 1998. They closed their A round in June 1999. AdWords launched in October of 2000, but they were selling ads through sales people for quite a while before that. Selling ads was always the plan from day 1.

[gman83]

Yeah but Larry Page & Sergey Brin developed PageRank in 1996.

[lisper]

Yes, as an academic research project. We can quibble over what it means to be "released", but the main point is that when it came time to try to monetize the technology, it was advertising from day 1. No other revenue-generation model was ever tried, or even seriously considered.

[ams6110]

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.

[kuschku]

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

[arbitrage]

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."

[decebalus1]

> Google didn't start advertising until a couple of years after it was released.

How was Google making a living before advertising?

> Advertising is very much its core now but it wasn't always that way.

What was its core prior to advertising? I mean a money-making core.

[grantph]

> How was Google making a living before advertising?

It wasn't. Every search engine at the time had struggled to make money. It wasn't until Google "borrowed" pay-per-click auction bidding from Overture that advertising became their focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing#Patent...

I suspect they'd planned to roll out enterprise products. (You know - "the box" - like they did in Silicon Valley). That business started later (circa 2002):

https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html

But, by that stage, their ad revenue was killing everything.

[lambdasquirrel]

remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?

google was an intentional step away from the kind of “engagement” that so much of social media represents — and FB epitomizes. the problem with your argument is that it loses sight of what is really at stake here.

[pessimizer]

> remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?

Not my memory of Altavista. Also, when I google any book ever written, I don't hit any link not trying to sell it to me, just showing me wikipedia copy, and/or trying to trick me into something completely unrelated until around the tenth page.

[whatever_dude]

> Not my memory of Altavista

I moved to Google from Altavista _specifically_ because of how shitty the experience had become.

It was good during the days of digital.altavista.com but they quickly started adding a lot of noise to the point where the actual power of a search was relegated to a small search field and a bunch of hard-to_parse results. Maybe they were not banners, but it was still a lot of crap.

I think Google quickly learned that lesson. I was expecting them to pivot to a website full of gunk but it didn't really happen. For better or worse, they found other ways to make money.

[sumeno]

What are you looking for when you search for a book?

[watwut]

Not him, but in no particular order:

* reviews, * analysis (historical context, more about author etc), * other peoples thoughts about that book, * free legal copy on Guttenberg, * I am bored and dont care what comes out as long as it is interesting (which excludes selling places due to them not being interesting).

[sumeno]

I just don't see the behavior the op is describing.

I tried searching for the last 5 or 6 books I've read, in every single case the results that came up were Amazon and Wikipedia, but also Goodreads, the authors website, at least one review or article about the book, and several had wikis.

In the main results I never saw more than two places to buy the book (unless the authors are selling it directly through their site, I didn't check). The bar on the right side of the page did include additional places to buy the ebooks, but it also includes places to borrow the ebooks, which is a cool feature I didn't even know existed until now.

[redbeard0x0a]

I would venture to say that the ads are tied directly into their core DNA of search. The ads are tied to keywords and demographics (which is basically an ad searching for the correct person to be shown to).

[HenryBemis]

Google is monetizing on the huge effort and improvements of their search machines. Gmail, Google docs, are just more paths to learn information about their users (investment)

The money comes in from promising to the real customers that they will deliver the right ad to the right eyes.

[logicallee]

>would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.

How quick people are to forget the 20 page research paper by Larry Wall and Sergey Brin that started all this: "anatomy of an ad engine", I think it was called.[1]

Google could exist even if it was just an empty page with banner ads, as long as it could get people to visit it, for example if it paid Firefox to set it as the default startup ad page. It doesn't really need to offer any services and has never been about that.

/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/ssssss in case you need it

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

[logicallee]

I'm very surprised to see this downvoted to -4. So, the actual history is that they came up with the technology first, and when they needed to monetize, they were against the invasive banner ads at the time, introducing text ads instead. Google has been about technological innovation (for example, the introduction of maps was a technological innovation and then required massive acquisition of map sources) and they have done huge amounts of technical work. They've scanned millions of books, turning one page after another.

The idea that Google's core DNA is advertising is simply laughable on its face.

[patmcguire]

There are many ways to do advertising. Serving ads most relevant to a search query is the searchiest way to do it.