I think this is backwards, like saying that a road paving company built cars. The need exists because the Web took off and became huge, and maybe Google can take credit for helping it scale, but Google was only successful because other people were creating content people wanted to find at a massive rate. If the web was tiny we could use hand curated indices. If Google was never founded, and the web got bigger, one of the other dozens of search companies would have helped the web scale instead.
I think this is backwards, like saying that a road paving company built cars. The need exists because the Web took off and became huge, and maybe Google can take credit for helping it scale, but Google was only successful because other people were creating content people wanted to find at a massive rate. If the web was tiny we could use hand curated indices. If Google was never founded, and the web got bigger, one of the other dozens of search companies would have helped the web scale instead.