David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It was not strategic for them. It was a conflict of interest to implement this type of better ranking, better search, faster technology. Back to the lab, right? No deal. Exactly. That fall in 1997, Larry and Sergey go back to school. All these get-rich-quick deals have fallen apart. Nobody wants BackRub. Larry’s just like, well F it. This is how I believe search should work. We’re going to build this thing ourselves here at Stanford. Quote from him, “We couldn’t get anyone interested in buying BackRub. We did get offers, but they weren’t for much money. So we said whatever. We went back to Stanford to work on it some more. These companies weren’t going to focus on search. They were becoming portals. IE they wanted eyeballs, page views. They didn’t understand search and they weren’t technology people.” And when he says we talked to others, they tried to sell PageRank to Yahoo for $1 million and were rejected. There are going to be chapters of this story that you can mark by the different times that Yahoo discussed buying Google and didn’t. But this is the very first. They showed the tech to Infoseek, also didn’t happen. Infoseek was bought by Disney and later shut down. They showed the tech to Lycos. They were shopping it all around town.…

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