[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.