[scoofy]

Yea, that's easy to say now.

I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.

[ethbr1]

"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)

Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.

It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.

[icedchai]

I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)

[ompogUe]

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

[ethbr1]

But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.

[icedchai]

There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.

[ethbr1]

None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

[icedchai]

AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...

[radicalbyte]

Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.