Google had relegated advertising to steerage class: its AdWords team consisted of seven people, most of whom shared the founders’ general antipathy toward ads. The tone had been set in Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s milestone paper that unveiled their search engine conception, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” presented at the 1998 World Wide Web Conference: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market… we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 220