There is a good argument to be made that Google is a more influential company than Apple, but this article doesn't present it. Once you take away the unsubstantiated (at least in the article) fluff, such as "Google preaches openness because it benefits the company", here are Google's concrete accomplishments, according to the article: 1) Their core technology, Google search. 2) The fact that they bought YouTube. This…
The inevitability argument can be made for YouTube, but I don't think it can be made for Google search. Remember, before the PageRank algorithm, people thought Internet search was a dead end. The leading search providers were continuing to push pure boolean queries; an approach that was quickly becoming unsustainable under the mass of spam that was starting to exploit text-relevance metrics. Google's use of link-base…
I think it can. Around the time that PageRank was published, Jon Kleinberg also published the HITS (hubs & authorities) algorithm. There are some key differences in the way they work, and Page & Brin smartly went on to found Google around PageRank, but it was becoming evident in that period that hyperlink-based ranking was a smart thing to do.