Surely, Google started with a vision?
I believe it did but not a commercial one.
In early 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin as part of a Ph.D research project wanted to test whether relationships between web sites would give more accurate and relevant results than existing search engines. Search engines in the mid 1990s produced results based on how many times the search term appeared on the page.
Remember though this is the mid 1990s.
The commercial internet is still in its infancy, the world is not awash with web sites, connection speeds are slow and the general public has not even heard of the internet let alone used it. So how could Larry and Sergey possibly have a commercial vision for what they were doing?
They may have had the conviction of true techies, believing this emerging technology would day become all-consuming but could they ‘hand-on-heart’ really believe they had a commercial winner on their hands. Nobody in the mid 1990s, even the most ardent web pioneers, could possibly predict the turbo-charged adoption of the internet.
Their vision was academic at this stage.
The commitment to what they were doing lay almost exclusively in the world of research labs and doctorates than in creating a money making machine.
Originally called BackRub, (thank goodness they changed the name or history may have been very different – we’ll look at names another time) the project set out to prove that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages, would give search results of most relevance to the user. Interestingly, a similar project called RankDex was also testing a similar theory. So Google did not have the land to themselves.
Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website and went by the domain name of google.stanford.edu. Not until September 1997 was google.com registered and not for another year in September 2008 was Google Inc registered at a friend’s garage. By this stage a vision was emerging as their efforts were starting to produce convincing results but it could have all been so different.
A loyal following was developing among mainly students especially who were attracted to its simple and uncluttered design. Visual distractions that were becoming the norm on established search engines such as Alta Vista were conspicuous by their absence on Google. Yet it had taken nearly three years to move from a research project to a commercial entity.
And even at this stage what was the vision?
To create a search engine that produced better results than the competition or to index the world’s knowledge and information?
The latter was definitely still around a very long corner.
But if there had been a vision at the outset would progress have been quicker? Possibly. But what would the vision have been given the immature state of the internet, the low user base and the inferior technology available? And even if there had been a clear vision, what if it had been wrong or misguided?
Sometimes, the vision just creeps up as a consequence of the blind faith efforts of the people involved. We ‘know’ we have something we just don’t know what!
