Gabriel Ayuso
@gabrielayuso.eth
This first episode is a good reminder of all the early ingredients that made Google, Google. The initial spark was the innovative PageRank ranking algorithm which made Google's results significantly better than everybody else's. To power that in a cost effective way, there was a lot of innovation in distributed systems and server design to be able to use cheap off the shelf components in a reliable and scalable way. All the way from hardware to filesystems to database design to parallel processing workflows to networking to front end server design. The whole industry still runs on tech descendants from those early Google innovations. That's only on the technical side. On the business side, they created the best business model the Internet has ever seen which helped keep the company alive after the dot com bubble burst and turned it into the giant it is today. But none of this mattered if they didn't get distribution. If users didn't search using Google. That's where "powered by Google" and the Internet Explorer Google toolbar came in. People might be surprised about how much Google pays Apple to be the default Search engine in Safari but they've been doing this since the early days by making sure the Google toolbar was installed in Internet Explorer (before Chrome) so it would become the defacto default search engine before Microsoft was able to enter the market. That's why Chrome exits. To control their own destiny, not depend on Microsoft and to keep people searching on Google instead of Microsoft's future search engine, Bing. Innovation in ranking. Innovation in data center design. Innovation in distributed systems design. Innovation in business model. Innovation in distribution.
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