Google in 1999: Search Engines Escape the Portal Matrix
Like Morpheus in The Matrix, Google gave web users a stark choice in 1999: take the red pill and experience a new world of search quality, or choose the blue pill and stick with the bloated world of portal search.
Google founders, 1999; photo by William Mercer McLeod.
"Aren’t you rather late to the game?"
It's January 1999 and that question was put to Google's young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The interviewer was Karsten Lemm from a German startup magazine called Stern. Lemm, who later in the article cited AltaVista and Excite as "established search engines," was right to be skeptical. After all, Page and Brin's company, Google, had only been incorporated four months ago.
"It’s possible to do a much better job on search, and it’s the main application that people use on the Internet," replied Page. "So there’s a big opportunity, because if you do a better job really matters to people. People make decisions based on information they find on the Web. So companies that are in-between people and their information are in a very powerful position. There’s clearly space there for other players."
"Users may not even realize but subconsciously they end up using your search engine because it works better for them," Brin added. "Users end up going where the search is best."
Both Page and Brin were convinced they had "the best search" (as Page actually said in this interview). But it took time for the rest of the web surfing population, other than Google's early users, to notice.
Google in January 1999.
Six months later, on June 7, 1999, Page and Brin held their first press conference. Only a sprinkling of reporters turned up to the Gates Building in Stanford University, where the pair had started their search engine research project a few years before. Today they were announcing Google's first big funding round — $25 million from two of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But despite the support of these two VC heavyweights, nobody in the room that day had any clue what kind of juggernaught Google would turn into over the coming years. Except perhaps for Page and Brin.
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