In 2000 Larry Page said Google was ‘nowhere near’ the ultimate search engine—25 years later, Gemini might be close

Google cofounder Larry Page had a vision for search engines 25 years ago that sounds eerily close to what its AI product Gemini is making possible today.

Page, who started Google with cofounder Sergey Brin, served in his first stint as CEO from the company’s founding in 1998 until 2001 when he was replaced by Eric Schmidt, who would serve in the role for a decade.

When Google was founded, the concept of the search engine was still fairly new. Google took it to the next level with its PageRank algorithm, which looked at hyperlinks between web pages to rank the best results rather than using keywords.

“Search engines didn’t really understand the notion of which pages were more important,” Page said at the time. “If you type Stanford, you get sort of random pages that mention Stanford. This obviously wasn’t going to work.” 

In just a couple of years, Google’s innovation took it from a non-player dwarfed by market leaders like AltaVista and Yahoo to a real competitor. 

By 2000 the upstart company had captured 25% of the search market—a significant advance but still far from its 90% dominance now. Page claimed the company was making $80 million a year in ad search revenue in 2000, compared with just under