Well, back in '96 when Google was founded, the idea centered around improving the fundamental concept of how search engines worked at the time.
Specifically:
They [Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University] hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page (source: Wikipedia)
The genius of this, I think, was how they identified and focused on this basic need before anyone else had either done so
or had perfected it (taken it to market). The genius was not solely in the software development either. At the time another search engine named Rankdex was out there - and Page/Brin were ultimately successful due to their
passion of the basic idea
combined with creating a simple but pleasing GUI and powerful back end means of handling large amounts of data. It all boils down to the classic Capitalist means of success - identifying a need and resolving it in a way that's appealing to the masses.
That's one model, or road map, of
how you might approach becoming the next "Google". But I warn you, this is no "formula". If it really was that easy, we'd all be rich ($21 billion in revenues for Google in 2008).
-jim
