The Day I Said No to Google – DrWeb’s Domain

A personal essay… from DrWeb

The Day I Said No to Google

“I am probably the only person I know who said ‘no’ to Google in a meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin…”

Confession: Given my birthday coming up (hint!), I am older than dirt. Some of the memories remain, thank genes I guess. But, others are foggy. I remember the day, but the exact date escapes me. I remember the meeting, but in many ways, it has blurred into meetings of my life for business. So, I cheated, kinda. You get to decide. Claude, a creative intelligence, assisted me with the writing. I edited. This is what we did together. It felt like the best way to tell this old story now. Let’s travel back to yesteryear.. the Internet was young… One history note, I was the first Webmaster at DIALOG, and employed there from 1995-1997, when along with many others, MAID bought DIALOG, and I was let go, fired. Carry your things out in box time. My time at America Online was December, 1998, Product Manager for AOL NetFind, until November, 1999. Enjoy the memory lane!

The Meeting Above the Shop

The afternoon sun streamed through the windows of that small conference room above a Palo Alto shop, casting long rectangles of California light across our makeshift boardroom table. It was one of those perfect Silicon Valley days where the air itself seemed to hum with possibility, but the fluorescent overhead lights and generic office chairs reminded us this was business, not a social call.

I’d arranged my materials carefully before they arrived—a brief summary report for my AOL team, printed specs for what we needed, bottled water for everyone. The kind of preparation that had become second nature after years in this business [and later becoming DIALOG’s first webmaster dealing with sophisticated databases and searches], now managing search for America Online in this digital Wild West. Twenty-five million AOL users were counting on decisions like this one, though they’d never know it.

When Larry and Sergey walked in, there was something almost academic about them—Larry doing most of the talking while Sergey hung back, observing. Their energy was unmistakably that of people who believed they were onto something big. But belief and business results were different things, as I’d learned the hard way. Perhaps it was like meeting Steve Jobs, early, in his garage.

We think we can scale this in ways nobody else can, Larry was saying, sketching out their vision with the kind of confident hand gestures. You could hear the enthusiasm.

The algorithm they called PageRank sounded revolutionary in theory—ranking pages by how other pages linked to them, like academic citations. Elegant, certainly. But elegant theories didn’t always survive contact with millions of real users hitting your servers every day. Then, at AOL, we were still in the era of typing in code and managing data with spreadsheets, so, yes, after all—proven performance mattered more than brilliant concepts.

The afternoon conversation had that particular rhythm of meetings where both sides already knew the likely outcome. We asked about customers—they had few. Performance metrics under load—they were working on it. Detailed technical specifications—still being refined.

I felt those were all reasonable answers for a startup, but AOL couldn’t run on reasonable answers. We needed proven, and growign solutions, the kind Excite was delivering with their concept-based search algorithm and comprehensive portal approach—news, weather, email, the one-stop destination our users expected. I used Excite, so were many early adopters.

I found myself watching Sergey more than listening to Larry at one point. There was something in his quiet attention that suggested he understood exactly what we were really evaluating. Not just their technology, but their readiness to handle the weight of AOL’s scale and expectations. Maybe he knew, as I was beginning to suspect, that this was more a friendly courtesy call than a serious negotiation.

The meeting wound down with handshakes and the kind of polite enthusiasm that masks mutual recognition—they knew we weren’t ready to bet on an unproven system, and we knew they weren’t ready for us yet. Outside, that sunlit, warm California afternoon continued, indifferent to the small pivotal moment that had just passed in a conference room above a Palo Alto shop.

Later, writing up my report for the team, I found myself thinking about Steve Case back at headquarters in Virginia. Our larger-than-life CEO had built AOL by making bold bets, but also by knowing when to stick with what worked. Excite had customers, track records, proven performance under the kind of load we’d throw at them. Our homework showed the numbers, and it was a future option we felt we had to explore.

Their concept-based searching could understand meaning beyond mere keyword matching—sophisticated technology that had already proven itself with millions of daily users. It wasn’t glamorous compared to Larry and Sergey’s academic theories, but it was safe. And yet, choosing Excite felt like the next step, of what would be many.

I never found out if my report made it all the way to Case’s desk, but I liked to think it did—one small decision in the endless stream of choices that kept twenty-five million people connected to the emerging world of the web. At the time, it felt like the right call. Careful. Responsible. Business-smart.

The irony, of course, would only become clear later.

History Snapshots: Search Before Google

Archie (1990)

Before the web itself existed, Archie emerged at McGill University in 1990 as the first widely used search tool. It did not crawl the content of files, but instead indexed file names on FTP servers, creating the first searchable index of distributed online information. While crude by later standards, Archie was revolutionary: for the first time, a user could query a remote database and discover resources without browsing manually. The very idea of building an automated index to navigate digital information became a foundation stone for everything that followed.

WebCrawler (1994)

By 1994, the World Wide Web needed something more than Archie. Brian Pinkerton’s WebCrawler, launched at the University of Washington, became the first engine to allow full-text searches of web pages. Suddenly users could search within page content, not just titles or filenames, and the results reflected the words as they actually appeared on the page. This was a dramatic leap forward for usability, and WebCrawler quickly reached millions of queries per day. It also popularized the notion that search engines could serve ordinary consumers, not just information professionals or academics.

AltaVista (1995)

Introduced in December 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation’s research team, AltaVista was a marvel of its time. It featured an enormous index, lightning-fast crawling, and support for natural language queries at a scale that felt futuristic. For many users, AltaVista was their first exposure to advanced search operators, real-time translations, and near-instant indexing. It quickly became one of the most visited destinations on the web, demonstrating how technology and infrastructure could turn search into a mainstream activity. In many ways, AltaVista defined what people expected a modern search engine to be.

Excite (1995)

Launched commercially in late 1995, Excite took a different approach by expanding search into a broader “portal” experience. Beyond simply indexing the web, Excite offered news, weather, email, and community features that encouraged users to stay on its site. Its acquisitions and partnerships helped it grow into a household name, and by the late 1990s it was considered one of the most important online brands. Excite’s strategy was not only to provide answers but to create an ecosystem of services, an approach that reflected the business logic of the early Internet era: keep users inside your walls, and monetize their time.

AOL NetFind (1997)

In March 1997, AOL — already the largest Internet gateway in America — launched its own branded search engine called NetFind. Instead of building new technology, AOL partnered with Excite to power the service, ensuring scale and reliability for its millions of subscribers. For users, it meant search was seamlessly integrated into the familiar AOL interface. For the company, it was a strategic move to control not only access to the Internet but also discovery of information within it. The choice to align with a proven engine like Excite over a then-unknown upstart like Google reflected a natural preference for stability and trust in the late 1990s corporate environment.

Inktomi (1996)

Founded by Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier in 1996, Inktomi was often described as the “early Google.” Unlike portals, it focused on scale and infrastructure, indexing more than 100 million web pages and delivering results in fractions of a second. It licensed its search technology to popular services including HotBot, Yahoo, MSN, and Disney’s Internet Guide, making it a behind-the-scenes powerhouse of the search ecosystem. For a time, Inktomi appeared destined to dominate the field, with a high-profile IPO and enormous venture support. But within a few years, it would be eclipsed by Google’s more elegant algorithmic model — proof that even the giants of one generation could quickly become footnotes in the next.

Bibliography

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