Once upon a time, a very long time ago in internet years – 1998 – Google was truly great. A couple of lads at Stanford University in California had the idea to build a search engine that would crawl the world wide web, create an index of all the sites on it and rank them by the number of inbound links each had from other sites. In other words, they built a kind of automated peer review for the web, and it came as a revelation to those of us who had been struggling for yonks with AltaVista and other search engines.
The only problem was that Google initially didn’t have a business model (partly because the founders didn’t like advertising) but in 2000 it came up with one. It involved logging everything that users did on the platform, analysing the resulting data stream so that its real customers – advertisers – would know what users might be interested in.
