[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.