Thread by @FoolMCochrane

1/ $GOOG/L reported its 2019 full-year and Q4 earnings today after the bell and the big news was that it was (finally) breaking out its Youtube and Google Cloud numbers.

But $GOOGL is all about Search and I can't help but admire how far its come in under 25 yrs.

2/ In 1995, the newly dubbed world wide web was exploding, w/ more than 100K web pages by the end of year. But there was no easy way to find something on the web or sort these pages.

One early solution was to painstakingly index each and every page, like the Yahoo folks did.

3/ Yahoo thought users wanted to explore the web, so they carefully curated stories and indexed pages, not seeing future in search.

This could be b/c early search engines were so bad. Early search engine bots (e.g. Lycos, Excite) randomly scoured the web indexing as they went.

4/ About this time two Stanford post-graduate students were becoming friends and exploring future projects together. Enter Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

5/ The two were perfectly suited to collaborate on something like $GOOGL. Page was all about user-interface design and human-computer interactions. This was considered a soft subject, touchy-feely almost, but it made Page devoted to the idea that the user was always right.

6/ These ideals would later differentiate Google from early competitors. On other search engines, users were told they were not entering search queries right. Google would continue to tweak with formula and algorithms until user found what they were looking for.

7/ Sergey Brin's focus was data mining, another thing that came in handy when founding $GOOG/L.

8/ Page was searching for a dissertation topic and finally centered on ranking web pages similar to how academic papers were valued.

The more an academic paper was cited, the higher it was valued.

Similarly, Page figured, the more a web page was linked the higher its value.

9/ This wasn't an easy task! Even back then there were 100K websites, 10M documents, and 1B links across WWW. Soon the project was taking up half of Stanford's bandwidth!

By July 1996, project had collected 24M URLs.

10/ As the project - first called Backrub - progressed the search algorithm grew more complex. they soon began ranking the quality of the links based on the quality of the pages they originated from, i.e. link from NYT or WSJ more valuable than college student's blog.

11/ It was at this point, it dawned on Page and brin that the had discovered a great idea for a bang-up web search engine.

12/ Again, Page's background with user interfaces proved invaluable. He knew user was right and deserved answers they were looking for without having to fix their queries.

The project, now dubbed PageRank, continued to introduce more factors into its algorithms, making it better

13/ Page and Brin continued pushing. Google devoted more resources to processing, storage, and bandwidth to search. It also considered it a failure whenever users had to go to the second or third page of results after entering a search.

14/ Page and Brin knew they had found something big, but first tried to just sell it ... for just $1M!!! But Alta Vista, Excite, and Yahoo! all turned them down, again believing that search just wasn't that important.

15/ After being rejected, Page and Brin easily found venture capital support and founded Google.

If you're interested in knowing how the rest of the story unfounded you can just "Google" it 😉

All passages from @WalterIsaacson's wonderful book, The Innovators.