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 Google, in reference to the absurdly large number called a googol—would remain noncommercial and freely available to the public through Stanford.

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 Engine,” Brin and Page offered an example of the danger to the public from search results that were tainted by advertising. As a test, they typed in the query “cellular phone” at all the prominent search sites. Only the Google prototype, they reported, returned a top result that was critical of cell phones, specifically a cautionary study about speaking on the phone while driving. PageRank didn’t return the link in order to do the right thing, the two explained; it was simply conveying to its users what the Web thought were the most relevant links to someone interested in cell phones. The better question to ask was, Why didn’t the other sites link to that study? Page and Brin’s answer: “It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers.”

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 shown where to go based on the consensus “best result,” and thus should have little interest in hearing what an advertiser wanted to tell you. OK, there might be a few ads to introduce a new product, or to try to persuade you to switch between brands, but this wasn’t the basis of growing business. A search engine needed to sell something valuable—like reaching customers in a way competitors couldn’t—if it wanted to make a lot of money. The bad incentives were clear: search companies would stop trying to improve their services for business reasons, which is why Page and Brin toward the end of their paper made the following assertion: “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.”

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 instead be talking about a different pair of brilliant Stanford graduate students who researched how to improve Web search and inevitably found their way to Sand Hill Road, while our alternative-universe Brin and Page would be obscure but distinguished computer science professors?