By the late 1990s, as Microsoft's content initiative faded, word was spreading about a new company named Google, whose specialty was search. Search became a major application as the Internet got more populated, fast becoming wild and woolly, too vast to tune in to like a TV channel. There were a number of search engines running—Lycos, Magellan, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo!, which originally launched as an Internet directory, to name a few. But it was soon clear that Google did search better than anyone else; its inventors were smart, its algorithm was wicked, and its code was tight. With a simple search box placed on a white page, it was both elegant and technically a quantum leap over what was then available. But all who followed the company knew it had one massive and potentially fatal problem. Google was more like an academic project than a firm, and as it gained in popularity, it was burning through cash at a terrifying rate, with nary a business model in sight.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 870