[InclinedPlane]

Close. Lots of other companies were also hiring pretty high tier talent as well, and had intense focus. Google's success came down to effectively executing across typically disparate disciplines. You have hard core research level CS eggheads, you have top tier software engineers, and you have state of the art data center operations. In a typical organization these groups have competing interests, they fight amongst themselves and in the end some sort of compromise is reached that allows everyone to grudgingly get along.

At google these three groups worked hand in hand and complemented each other's work. The eggheads came up with page rank, the coders figured out how to make pagerank scale through massive paralellism via sharding and mapreduce, and the data center folks figured out how to make sharding cheap and fast through commodity pc based servers and massive amounts of automation for management. In the end everyone was working at the top of their game to help everyone else. The result was that google was able to deliver better results (pagerank) faster (mapreduce) and cheaper (automated commodity hardware datacenters) than the competition.

There were lots of other fine details that led to google's success, but in the end those core factors are what allowed them to deliver a better search experience to users (better/faster) and to be more competitive in the marketplace (lower cost per search means more profit even with lower per search ad revenue).

No one else in search was pushing on all the right pressure points the way google was, and the rest is history.

[joe_the_user]

Excellent point.

From the article: "In short, Google had realized that a search engine wasn't about finding ten links for you to click on. It was about satisfying a need for information. For us engineers who spent our day thinking about search, this was obvious. Unfortunately, we were unable to sell this to our executives. Doug built a clutter-free UI for internal use, but our execs didn't want to build a destination search engine to compete with our customers. I still have an email in which I outlined a proposal to build a snippets and caching cluster, which was nixed because of costs."

The engineers here had more than inkling what needed to be done. The problem was this didn't go through the entire company.

[paulsutter]

I agree, but I'd ascribe that to Google being run by technical founders rather than MBAs. The main benefit of technical company leadership is the ability to "see" across and coordinate the disparate areas.

Infighting and begrudging compromises only happen when the leadership is blind to the details.

[InclinedPlane]

Having technical founders is a necessary but not sufficient condition, I think. Lots of companies have had technical founders who haven't managed a level of success as impressive (regardless of scale) as google.

[jahewson]

The word "egghead" is rather demeaning, perhaps we can refrain from using high-school insults here?

[PakG1]

If black people can call themselves niggers and not be insulted, can geeks call themselves eggheads and not be insulted? Not that I condone black people calling themselves niggers, but if anyone can, they can. So why not geeks and the word egghead? Heck, even geek was a high school derogatory word.