What do Google's founders tell us about data monetisation, advertising, and public funding of research?

Rana Faroohar points to this original paper by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page which conceptualised the idea of search engines and Google.

They could not have been more prescient about what they themselves would end up doing,

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

Given these problems, this is what the duo thought about operationalisation of search engines,

The issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

And this about personal data monetisation,

... we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search-engine bias is particularly insidious.

The acknowledgements section of the paper highlights the central role played by public funding (effectively as angel or seed investors) in the emergence of Google,

The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project.

Interesting that none of the private venture capital were part of the conceptualisation of Google!