No one knew how they could be monetized. The original idea was that they had to be curated: Yahoo led the way into grouping sites into categories. Later came Altavista and others. Again, the infrastructure was expensive and no one knew how all that could be paid for. Google's founders, while still at Stanford, released a picture of a server sitting on a table. That was Google. Later, someone figured out that search equals advertising and that's how search was monetized. At first, local search was useless and newspapers and other legacy media could have hung on to that slice. But Google got better and better...