Google Is Not A Technology Company
When Google first came out, it was a legitimate technology company. Not because it was a search engine, but because it was a search engine that was actually new and useful.
Unlike other popular search engines of the time, Google didn’t just match your keywords to specific websites. It also ranked those websites — based on PageRank.
PageRank is what made Google so special to use. It’s a simple algorithm that ranks the credibility of a website based on how many other websites link to it. It was primitive and eventually many people figured out how to game it — an industry still alive today — but it gave Google search results a tremendous amount of objectivity and trust.
As a result, Google made a lot of money very fast. Between 1999 and 2004, it went from making $220,000 a year to making $1 billion a year. This kind of growth was — and still is — absolutely insane. I mean, they called it a unicorn for a reason.
2004 was also the year when Google launched Gmail, another amazing product. Perhaps it wasn’t as innovative as search, but it was fast and clean, and, from a technical perspective, doing an email service at scale is probably even harder than doing a search engine.
But then, things got kind of weird. Instead of focussing on making new things, Google started pumping out clones of…
