[mellavora]

It isn't a problem with ads. The problem is the misalignment between the business model and the product, and also the misalignment between the business model and the main users of the system.

Another better system? Look at the early days of Google, they never would have gotten off the ground without very generous support from academia and specifically their university. What if it had been kept a university-based product?

And yes, it could have reached its current search capacity and still remained a Stanford-based initiative. Stanford has the resources. We might not have gotten any of the other google products out of that, but Google seems to cancel them all anyway, so I don't see a huge difference.

[lrem]

Does Stanford actually have that kind of resources? Based, say, on Randal Munroe's estimation of Google's capacity?

[joshuamorton]

You can get a better estimate from Google's CapEx in it's financials.

Stanford's endowment is ~30 billion. Google's CapEx is ~20 billion a year and has been for the last 4 years or so. You can weasel about exactly how much of that is attributable to search as opposed to other initiatives, (but even if you look back a decade to when Google was mostly search, it was running a CapEx of ~5 billion/year). So even making pretty favorable estimations, you'd be looking at Stanford being bankrupt around now.