The web and the Internet itself are now so big that without decent search, it’s easy to imagine that the whole edifice would have collapsed under its own complexity by now. But by improving on Overture’s pioneering work with paid links, Google was able to achieve something just as amazing: it made the Internet profitable at scale and for the first time. Paid search would prove to be the greatest advertising engine yet devised by man. Furthermore, algorithmically served ads would support nearly every product Google would release subsequently: Image Search, Google News, Gmail, Google Maps,
...more
