Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too

By SAUL HANSELL
Published: October 30, 2005
Mountain View, Calif.

IN many ways, Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem an unlikely pair to lead an advertising revolution. As Stanford graduate students sketching out the idea that became Google, the two software engineers sniffed in an academic paper that "advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, top, with the co-founders of the company, Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page.

They softened that line a bit by the time they got around to pitching their business to venture capitalists, allowing that selling ads would be a handy safety net if their other, less distasteful ideas for generating revenue didn't pan out."...