Google’s founders initially opposed advertising as inherently biasing search toward advertisers

Evidence

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 Capitalism, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Irony worth chasing for the reader: the firm that built surveillance capitalism on ads began by explicitly rejecting ad-funded search. — connects to: Fear of financial obscurity drove Google founders to abandon founding principles — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 264; Google’s founders reluctantly accepted advertising only as an economic necessity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 884; Google’s founders rejected paid search because mixed incentives corrupt results — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 879 (+5 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: the original critique of advertising-funded search written by Google’s founders as a blueprint document against the company we know today.

Broader Connections

• Google’s founders reluctantly accepted advertising only as an economic necessity #expands (0.95) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 884
• Google’s founders rejected paid search because mixed incentives corrupt results #exemplifies (0.93) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 879
• Google’s founders’ distaste for ads produced the least intrusive ad model ever built #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 892