The success of Google, the internet search engine, has come about through the old fashioned form of viral marketing: word of mouth.
The site has for some time been the default button for millions of people looking for anything they want to find online, from obscure quotations to any one of the 36,700 references to 1980s singer Pat Benatar. But there are increasing signs that the business is growing a commercial sharpness to match the rapier it uses to cut through the junk on the internet.
Google last week secured a place as the internet search engine for America Online, the world's largest service provider, capping its stealthy rise to the top. It also nabbed the lucrative contract - thought to be between $60m and $100m - to act as the provider of advertisements in online searches on AOL. The deal was agreed only months after Google launched the service. "The AOL deal will put Google on the map for paid listings," says the search engine's chief executive Eric Schmidt.
The actual terms of the deal were not disclosed but Wall Street had its view of how much it was worth. Google edged out Inktomi as the standard search engine on AOL and the Nasdaq-listed company's shares plunged by almost 25%. Shares in Overture Services, which had provided the advertising, fell even further, plummeting by more than 35%.
Overture, formerly known as GoTo, had pioneered the "paid listings" form of online advertising in which companies are included in search results for a fee. "This is a big blow to Overture and a coup for Google," says Paul Kim, media analyst with the New York investment bank, Kaufman Brothers.
AOL is blunt in its assessment of why it switched. "Google is the reigning champ of online search," says Bob Pittman, the man who has been put back in charge of AOL in the hope of restoring some momentum to it.
The tale of Google is in many ways a classic dotcom story. The business began as a research project at Stanford University, created by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were, respectively, 24 and 23 years old. Between 1996 and 1997, the pair built a precursor to Google, called BackRub. Then, in 1998, Google was born. In the usual fashion Brin's dorm room at college was used as the data centre while the business was run from Page's. The name Google is a play on the word googol, coined by the nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner to refer to the number represented by one followed by a hundred zeros.
By August of that year, with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they put their studies on hold and had raised $1m in funding from family, friends and angel investors. A month later, the firm was in its own offices and Google was answering 10,000 search inquiries a day. Since then growth has been near exponential. By February 1999, it was attracting 500,000 searches a day. It passed the 100m-a-day mark little more than a year ago and today handles 150m a day. In June 2000 it had 1% of all search referrals online. Today it handles 31.8%. Yahoo!, with 36.3%, is in its sights.
The pair, still in their 20s, now employ 270 people. The offices are pure internet - scooters, roller hockey equipment and a cafe where food is prepared by the former chef to the Grateful Dead.
The business is expanding and new ways of making money are also being developed including Google Answers, which lets users post questions and name a price they would pay for the answer.
The company claims to have been profitable for the past four years. In August, it hired Schmidt, the former chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems and boss of Novell, as chief executive to add some weight.
Google is still privately owned. Backers include venture capital firms, Stanford University and two hi-tech high fliers - Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and current vice-president of Cisco Systems, and Ram Shriram, a former president of business development at Amazon.com.
The agreements with AOL were interpreted by many as the prelude for a much-anticipated stock market flotation. But at this point, the strategies of Google and many of the archetypal dotcom companies start to diverge.
All through the gold rush, the founders of Google resisted being seduced by the promise of riches from a flotation. Instead they have been able to build the business steadily away from the glare of Wall Street or the City. There has been no share price to deal with and no hungry expectations from analysts.
Asked on US television if the time had at last come for the business to make the leap, Brin demurred: "This is something that has been asked for years and we think about it on and off but we have enjoyed being a private company without the distractions of quarterly earnings reports. We have been able to invest in the longer term." The strategy appears to have worked so far.