Larry Page initially resisted advertising because it would bias search results.

Evidence

It retrospect, it was a no-brainer. But the firm’s principal founder, Larry Page, was unusually sensitive to the corrupting potential of advertising. Before Google had come to its fork in the road, he had strenuously insisted in a piece coauthored with Brin that “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” As an engineer and scientist, Page had wanted to build a clean, pure tool, free of commerce’s distortions. His aversion, moreover, was not purely academic: he had seen what an advertising-driven search engine looked like, peddled by a man whom both Brin and Page found distasteful—a character, now mainly forgotten, who was for a while Google’s greatest rival. His name was Bill Gross. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 873

Categorization

• QUESTION: Who exactly was Bill Gross and what was his advertising-driven search venture? Worth chasing to understand Page’s specific counterexample.
• SEED: The tension between Page’s clean-tool idealism and the eventual surrender to advertising is an essay-ready inversion story about how attention merchants win despite founders’ scruples.
• XREF: connects to: Larry Page wanted software to organize society itself, not just information — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1278; Google’s founders initially opposed advertising as inherently biasing search toward advertisers — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 220

Broader Connections

• Google’s founders initially opposed advertising as inherently biasing search toward advertisers #corroborates (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 220