Maybe not--but the article is written in a way to minimize the importance of a good idea. Read below:
"In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year." (How to Start a Startup)
Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.
> Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.
Certainly Pagerank was important, but I would assume(so I could be wrong) there were Pagerank copycats in the early days. Having Pagerank was a necessity for Google or any copycat to become the best search engine. But it's the dozens of other things that they did at Google that were just as necessary to make a search site that didn't suck IMHO. Clean, fast, simple, etc. I think Pagerank was great but if you were to drop that behind the UI of a competing search engine it wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as it did at Google.
But my assumptions could be wrong. Maybe Google's IP prevented anyone from doing a PR copycat and that led to its success.
"In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year." (How to Start a Startup)
Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.