‘The need for search services grew with the expansion of the World Wide Web. One of the earliest search services, Yahoo!, selected and organized sites into categories by human editors. As the web grew, directory classification became infeasible. AltaVista invented technology that automated search, relying on software “crawlers” that created a searchable index of page contents, along with algorithms that ranked page relevance based on keyword frequency. Yahoo! added AltaVista’s algorithmic search engine, but in 1998 Yahoo! replaced AltaVista with Inktomi, which used parallel- processing to offer faster processing and a larger index. As website developers exploited search algorithms by repeating keywords on their pages, searches increasingly returned irrelevant listings—"spam”—that frustrated users. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page tackled this problem as graduate students at Stanford. Their PageRank algorithm, favored pages that were referenced (“linked to”) by other pages. These links signaled that another page's designer thought the focal page deserved attention. The focal page’s importance was determined by counting its inbound links, weighting links more heavily when they were cast by pages that Google had previously deemed to be important. In June 1999, Brin and Page announced first-round funding for their start-up, Google, from elite venture capital firms Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. A year later, Google's index of one billion web pages surpassed all rivals, and Google replaced Inktomi as Yahoo!’s search engine. At the time, Google was focused solely on algorithmic search; through December 1999, Google’s revenues came solely from licensing its search technology to Yahoo! and other sites. Meanwhile, Google.com initially carried no advertising and—eschewing the comprehensiveness of some portals—offered only search results, without content or communication tools. In contrast, many portals offered numerous add-ons