The Invisible Helping Hand of the Internet

How Google gave an Invisible Helping Hand to the Internet

A Business Model that Changed the World

These days, if you want to find something out, you "just Google it". But it was not always this way.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, good content was rare and hard to find. Search engines were simplistic and easily fooled by Web Masters who stuffed their pages with keywords.

This spamming of search engines meant that the search results were not useful, and it could be quicker to find information with more traditional resources like books.

The main search engines were Yahoo, Excite, and AltaVista. AltaVista was widely regarded as the king of these search engines, but still had problems with unscrupulous web sites hijacking their results pages.

Often, the content was not there to find anyway. Web sites still had costs and so information on web sites came from either manufacturers with vested interests or well-meaning amateurs. The industry view of the time was that search had to be augmented with a manually edited directory or portal supplied by the search engine group.

Then Google came along with a whole new approach to searching. They ranked Web sites based on links from other sites. The Google Guys also factored in how prominently keywords appeared on the page. The results were amazing - a Google search was finding the best match for the search. But the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and the often the sought after material was not there for Google to find.

But back at Google HQ, there was a bigger problem. The search engine was unquestionably the best and it was overtaking all its rivals in popularity. But there was no income. Google had originally thought they would sell their search engine software to companies to allow them to use it on their Intranets. However, this business model was not very successful. Company intranets were managed and did not have the unscrupulous web masters of the Internet. So simpler (cheaper) algorithms would work just as well. So Google had to find another way to monetise their search. They did not want to have sponsored results as many of the other search engines had at the time. Nothing should compromise the integrity of the Google search results.

The solution was Google AdWords and AdSense, a Dutch auction of advertising space for keywords not only on the search engine, but also on publishers' web sites. The advertisements were kept separate from the search results, appearing (at first) on the right hand side of the results page. The ads were text only and so appeared more "mature" than the gaudy, motion based ads that were in vogue at the time.

This business model had been invented to monetise Google's product - Internet search. But it's main effect came from the fact that the advertisements could appear on third party publishers' sites and that they could sign up for AdSense quickly and easily. Small web site publishers could make money by simply supplying useful information, no purchase required.

When we "just Google it", the information is supplied by an army of publishers relying on AdSense to cover their costs and sometimes to provide an income.

So Google unintentionally encouraged a useful World Wide Web for their search engine to find stuff in.

Back to Business Analysis