While Google’s reputation is that of organic growth, in reality the company bought placement on the Firefox homepage, as well as paid hundreds of millions of dollars per year to have Google search toolbars distributed via download with other applications and also paid laptop manufacturers to set Google as the default search engine. Google then used its search customer base to bootstrap other products and distribute Maps (Where2 acquisition55), Gmail, Chrome, Docs (Writely and other acquisitions), and other products.
