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After some fumbling with other ideas, Thiel and Levchin came up with PayPal, which would create “a new Internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” Thiel pitched the idea as fulfilling his anti-government dream of a global market that protects the welfare of the public by empowering them as consu…

All of which raises some intriguing alternative history: Would Brin and Page have remained true to noncommercial search had they met at a top-class school with a less go-go culture, like, say, MIT? Could they and we have avoided this reimagining of Google’s relationship with its users? Or would we …

Brin and Page had put their finger on the Catch-22 of the search business: if results improved so much that they became uncannily accurate and precise—like a chess computer arriving at the single best move for a certain position—then advertising will have lost much of its purpose. You would be show…

The ethical obligation to run a Web search engine without advertising reflected an academic’s belief in the importance of public access to information, which could be a matter of life and death. In a remarkable appendix to that 1998 paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engin…

Had all gone according to plan, the two young academics would have created their uncannily accurate search engine, published the results in an important academic paper, earned their PhDs, and become professors. At the same time, the search engine they developed—at first called BackRub and later Goo…