Google's first press release

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease1.html

by rokhayakebe • 17 years ago

41 38 17 years ago

google.com

daleharvey• 17 years ago

back in the days when you mentioned being on the board of webvan with pride

dotcoma• 17 years ago

and eToys, @Home, WebMD...

josefresco• 17 years ago

WebMB failed?

prakash• 17 years ago

Interesting, Sequoia & KPCB started in 1972.

tsally2• 17 years ago

Wow, a valuation of several billion? What a joke. They have no revenue stream, they're just giving away search for free. I don't see how this startup could ever be successful.

NathanKP3• 17 years ago

Your point is obvious: Twitter could very well be the next Google.

But back to the original article, all I have to say is that Google sure has changed a lot since those early days. ;)

igorgue• 17 years ago

Is there a "next Google", I don't think so

andreyf• 17 years ago

Twitter could very well be the next Google

Even in 1998, Google provided a lot more value to users than Twitter ever will.

andeka• 17 years ago

Not to mention the problem of search has already been mostly solved by yahoo ,webcrawler, and altavista. It's good enough.

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

You forgot hotbot!

timr• 17 years ago

The problem with your comment is that nine out of ten times, it's actually correct.

tsally2• 17 years ago

Actually, I would imagine the odds are worse than that. Not all startups give away their product for free, and I'm guessing the failure rate is higher for those that do.

But I don't see the problem with that. Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially. If somebody wants to swing for the fences, I don't think anybody should stop them. It's not the business model I would choose, but I certainly admire those that do.

Timothee• 17 years ago

"Google, a start-up dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web"

Google is one of these less common start-ups who started doing one thing and ended up successful (to this day) with that specific idea. Yes, they extended their reach a lot, but the core is still the same as on the first day.

dcurtis3• 17 years ago

Not really. Google is an advertising company now. When they started, they had no idea that's what they would become. Search is being leveraged for eyeballs to sell advertising space.

Google still does search, but it's business has nothing to do with search directly.

paul• 17 years ago

That's like saying that Walmart's business is cash registers.

If I could aquire either Google's search business, or their ad business, I would take search, no question. The ad part could be rebuilt on search, but the opposite is not true.

natrius• 17 years ago

Search eyeballs are the most valuable eyeballs on the internet. You know what people want, you can show ads for related things. Without search, Google would just be another ad network.

dkokelley• 17 years ago

I agree. Search is how Google builds its product, which is advertising. It's their competitive advantage. Because they have the best audience (targeted, biggest, etc.), they can use that to sell their advertising. By this measure, their product is superior to others, since they have put a lot of time into developing and refining their 'product' of advertising impressions, via the input of search traffic.

The company has an advantage, and it's using it to help sell something. Of course if they didn't have adwords, I'm sure Google could have found other ways to make money from their search.

stanleydrew2• 17 years ago

It's business has nothing to do with search directly? I can only assume you are being semantically pedantic here and using "business" to mean literally making money by selling a product. But even then I disagree with you. Yes they make 97% of revenue from selling ad-space next to search results. But without the search results that ad-space is (nearly) worthless. So how can you say Google's business has nothing to do with search directly?

euroclydon• 17 years ago

"PageRank is computed by solving an equation of 500 million variables and two billion terms."

Does it take 500 million variables to compute my Pagerank of 3 when there are only 32 sites that link to it? How many of those 500 million variables are 0 or null?

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Pagerank is a funny algorithm, think of it as a problem in gravitation, every page affects the pagerank of every other page.

You compute the equilibrium and then normalize the results.

There are a bunch of optimizations that you can apply in order to speed things up bit it is still quite computationally expensive.

ludwig• 17 years ago

For an overview of PageRank, you should check out http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html

hooande• 17 years ago

Did they really list the "I'm feeling lucky button" as a time saving feature in their first press release? I've spent a lot of time writing documents like this recently and I can only imagine how people would scold me for including a such a minor detail in a press release.

ugh• 17 years ago

Ahem. The “I’m feeling lucky button” might be a minor detail today but it for sure wasn’t then. Certainly not the thing to mention first (it isn’t) but considering the very narrow and minimalist scope of Google (then) nothing minor.

This is, however, quite a boilerplate press release. A [verb] B. X says [boss]. Boring. If you know one you know them all.

kierank• 17 years ago

Bear in mind the time it would take to load the results page on a dialup connection.

NathanKP3• 17 years ago

Is somebody eventually going to notice the misspelling in the title of this item and correct it? ;)

NathanKP3• 17 years ago

Good, it got taken care of.

Google's first press release

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