Facebook is social media. Google is Search!

Last time, I said Facebook has proven the theory of platform business models right (it states that exponential growth would be possible due to the indirect network effects). Google has proven it even more (and a few years prior to Facebook).

Have you wondered how today’s world (ok, let’s say the internet) would look like without Google? The early homepages for millions of internet users were portal (or tabloid)-type pages, where search was only one of the features often buried among a lot of clutter. Other prominent pages also adopted the portal-style design (here Yahoo 1994, and 1997), or just look at the current AOL.com.

When Google emerged, their pages looked very bare. They focussed only on one value proposition: search results and reduced all search and transaction costs involved (it is said that this was due to the fact that they did not know enough about webpage design but seems it was to their advantage).