I want to spend sometime talking about the Google Stock – GOOG

I promise to tie this into SEM very tidily at the end.

Currently I have “The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time” loaded onto my iPOD.

The author quotes the founder Larry Page as saying – have a “healthy disregard for the impossible.” Brin and Page have seemed to be more interested in achieving solutions to problems that interested them than being taught what was or was not possible. In the building of Google they did not follow in the footsteps of established SEs such as AltaVista, which had a 54% market share at the time, instead they went their own route. Before they started Google they tried to license/sell the PageRank technology to AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo! All of them passed.

Clearly Google is and remains a better search engine. Of course, the rest of the field has noticed the revenue potential of search. MSN and Yahoo! mimic Google in many ways. Such as their text ads.

What would have happened if Google launched a site that followed AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo! Would Google have tried to monetize every pixel on the screen? Would Google give preference to companies with money? Would we even be talking about Google right now? Maybe Google would have been relegated to the history books and some other dynamic duo came up with their own version of Google which I?€™d be writing about right now. And of course Larry and Sergey would be successful programmers or even VPs or CEOs in their time and probably worth millions, but certainly not billions.

On Saturday I was having lunch with my family. My dad asked me, was it black Friday yesterday? I had no idea what he was talking about. He was referencing the beating GOOG took on the market. It had dropped all the way to $399, from earlier highs of $470. This did not bother me because I don?€™t apply the lessons/fears created from the dot bubble to GOOG. Google is a special company with big ambitions and the talent and vision to pull it off. I think we are only at the beginning of what Google is going to show us.

I think it takes a special breed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom and established practices. And I think one of the last questions we should ask when we are wearing our SEM/SEO hats is ?€?What is the competition doing?

Neo, I believe. Um, sorry – that is the Matrix Revelations.

Larry, Sergey and Eric, I believe.