Pretty sure it was AOL, but it might've been Netscape...which was owned by AOL at the time, so still AOL. I'd heard of it from early (single-digit employee ID) Googlers, but am struggling to find a public source.
It was basically that very early in Google's history (late 1998 or first couple months of 1999), Google signed a deal to be their sole search provider in exchange for $Xm (this was right after their $25M funding round, and the total dollar amounts involved were more than they'd taken in funding up to that point). As part of the deal, they guaranteed AOL a certain minimum amount of revenue, basically saying "You will make $Ym >>> $Xm in additional revenue from people using our search engine, and if you don't we will pay you $Ym, so signing this deal is a no-brainer." At the time, $Ym was such that it would've bankrupted the company, so this was basically Larry taking a calculated risk that they could deliver on their promises.
There is a separate story related to this deal that was told to me in Noogler orientation, as an example of "focus on the user and all else will follow." They underestimated the traffic coming from AOL/Netscape, such that when they flipped the switch, all of their servers were instantly overwhelmed. Their response was to shut off their consumer-facing webpage and only handle AOL traffic. For a while, until they could get a handle on server capacity, visitors to google.com got a "connection refused" error and they basically functioned as a whitelabeled AOL search provider. And this was critical in building trust in Google within the industry. It seems ridiculous now, with both AOL and Netscape just memories, but Google at the time was a scrappy startup running on a shoestring.
That's really interesting. I'd love to read more stories like this of early Google since most of the public info doesn't really start until much later.
One of my projects at Google was the [google in 1998] Easter egg, which actually shows a SRP from early 1999. I got the mockup because Jeff Dean happened to have some old mockups of what Ads might look like lying around on his computer. They hadn't launched at the time.
Before that, Google's revenue was largely partnerships and one-off deals. They'd offer to provide search for some large Internet property in exchange for a large lump sum, the way most business was done at the time. The auction came later - IIRC it was invented in 2000, and its inventors got one of the first Founders Awards.
The way I heard it, upper management was aware of GoTo.com and it was a major factor in the pivot into the CPC auction business model, but GoTo.com was hardly a household name. I'd never heard of them until I joined Google (many years later) and started looking into the history of my employer, and their business model was white-labeled advertising for the other major search engines & portals (Yahoo, Altavista, etc.)
Yes, they were. Collecting revenue != common wisdom holds that their business model is a good idea. I recall that even at the IPO, there was widespread surprise that Google had been profitable since 2001, as most people had assumed they must be losing money.
There are wide information disparities and a long time lag between something becoming actually true and when it enters common wisdom. Heck, I can think of a couple cryptocurrency companies that made over a billion dollars in revenue (revenue, not valuation) last year and yet a good portion of the planet still thinks crypto is a fad or pyramid scheme.
