Hey, what I ended up deciding was since the Google episodes got combined into one, I'd give you this Gary Flake episode,

since he has a lot more direct personal stories about the whole Yahoo, Google, Search Wars era.

Enjoy! Oh, I'm going host, Brian McCullough.

Gary Flake has been involved with search technology ever since he got turned on to this particular field in college.

In today's wide-ranging discussion,

Gary's gonna lay out for us basically

the entire history of search technology before Google, the impact of Google on search as a

discipline, and then, since he lived it, the notion of competing with Google.

The reason why Gary can talk so in depth about this is that he was Yahoo's chief science officer in the early 2000s

when Yahoo via the infamous Project Panama and other initiatives attempted to keep Google from taking over the entire search market.

And because prior to that, Gary was at go to slash overture.

He also gives us basically the entire story of the birth of paid

search as an industry. I've mentioned on this show before and it'll be a major part of the book, but the story of

Google is essentially two miracles.

The first miracle is of course the Google search algorithm that essentially solves search.

And the second miracle is paid search.

AdWords, AdSense, all of that,

which is essentially the greatest advertising machine ever invented.

But not a lot of people remember, paid search was actually invented not by Google but by

go-to- slash overture. So all of this great stuff and

more on today's chat with Gary Flake.

Gary Flake, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast.

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