The recent news from Google on Talk, Maps, Earth, Desktop, et al reminded me of a couple of pivot points in the company's history. For this week's excerpt (I'm just back from time off, and digging out...) I'm going to post excerpts from two. First is the purchase of the assets of Deja and the move into new markets in 2001, next is AdSense in 2003. This is culled from two separate chapters so it may not flow perfectly.... Net net: the idea of Google expanding beyond search is not new – it’s been happening for years. The book stuff is really starting to heat up. I did my first reading/talk at the Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven, MA last Friday, and the first reviews are in as well, for more, see the Amazon page. Yikes..... (And by the way, thanks to your pre-orders, the book is first on the list of "Popular Pre-orders" for Business on Amazon. THANK YOU!) By the time Schmidt joined, Google was handling more than 100 million searches a day. Early in the year, the company began a raft of significant improvements to its search service, starting with the purchase of DejaNews, a failed attempt at making money from Usenet, a public messaging system composed of more than 500 mil- lion discrete postings on nearly every subject imaginable. While the acquisition of such a data-rich asset went largely unnoticed, the move marked a significant departure for the company. By acquiring Usenet and adding it to the index, Google was actively seeking out new information, as opposed to passively spidering the Web. The move was consistent with what would become the company’s new mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google would continue this trend through 2003...

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