I always find stories like this fascinating. It always reminds me of how fragile our futures are. If Google was acquired the internet will be a VERY different place today. I find it humourous because this kinda brings to mind Skynet from the Terminator. In the movies, they spend a lot of time sending killing machines to the past to take out people who would invent the future and it causes a great deal of chaos, while all they might need to do is add a clause in a merger or acquisition that botches a deal that prevents Skynet from existing and the mission is accomplished. LOL
Are you sure? If Google didn't remain Google within Excite, perhaps they wouldn't have been as successful, and would've still been replaced by the next Google-like company.
Perhaps, like judgement day, Google was inevitable.
Some of google's success was due to simple business decisions. An acquirer would reverse these, and google wouldn't win.
These were: uncluttered search-only, instead of a portal filled with junk; no paid-placement; it was also faster due to clever backend, so an acquirer could save money on the backend, bringing it down to adequate speed.
Some argue that The Algorithm (pagerank) wasn't important for google's success at all, except as marketing to geeks, because search results were comparable to alternatives.
Today, apart from consumer habit, google's biggest advantage is speed, possible by massive capital investment in datacenters.
But also today, google is hamstrung by money (Wall St), making them vulnerable, as previous search was.
OTOH the problem/need was there, maybe eventually there would have been another google targetting search-only.
I was an early user of Google too, and I don't remember the search results being any better than AltaVista (the dominant search engine at the time) or any of its other competitors.
Google was just fast and ad-free, unlike AltaVista, which was ad-infested and slow. That was the attraction for myself and the other people I knew who used it.
Perhaps we used to search for different things. AltaVista allowed far more control over operators and filters, but invariably I would have to dig much deeper in ther results to find what I was looking for. On google it would be there on the first page.
In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, one Terminator accidentally time traveled decades too far into the past, its arrival tweaking the timeline such that the person it was supposed to assassinate wouldn't be at the venue he was supposed to be. The terminator became a businessman and built a construction company, just to build the building where the assassination was to take place. According to records found, it was loved by its workers, since it cared more about getting the job done than about profits, and would regularly work alongside them.
So yeah, the idea doesn't need a lot of tweaking for a lawyer terminator to exist. They already do whatever they need to for their goal, they aren't just killing machines.
Realistically, killer machines wouldn't abide by the Geneva Convention and could just make up a poison gas or supervirus and wipe out all humanity without making humanoid robots in the first place.
