Observers failed to realize two things. First, Google’s business model innovation—the relevance-based, revenue-maximizing, self-service advertising system of AdWords—allowed it to generate far more revenue per search than its predecessors. Second, the importance of search was growing at a faster rate than the Internet as a whole. As the Internet grew and the amount of content increased at a superlinear rate, so did the difficulty of filtering and finding relevant information, making search increasingly important. Combine that effect with the rapid growth of the Internet itself, and the result
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