Re:Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
by ethbr1 on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:28PM
(#48373303)
But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.
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Re:Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
by icedchai on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:38PM
(#48373462)
There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
Re:Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
by ethbr1 on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @07:52AM
(#48382793)
None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.
Re:Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
by icedchai on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @08:17AM
(#48382984)
AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...
Re:Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
by ethbr1 on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @08:21PM
(#48392039)
Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.
That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.
It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.