Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/w...

Levick, the early ad-team member, agrees. “I think a lot of different companies were looking at marketplaces around that time, and Google was the one that really made it work,” he told me in a phone interview. “It’s no different from search. Google didn’t invent search, they reinvented search. They didn’t invent email, they reinvented email. You can take this all the way down to the self-driving car. Google doesn’t imagine business products, they reimagine them.”

Gross, for his part, seems comfortable, even happy, with how things turned out. And he has nothing but raves for Google. “I’m wildly proud of coming up with the paid-search model,” he told me. “I didn’t know how big it was at the time.” Besides, Gross says, if Google didn’t make billions with the pay-per-click auction model, it would have made its billions some other way. “I wish I had come up with the Google idea,” he says. “The Google idea was the idea for organizing the world’s information. Mine was just an idea for making money.”