2025-07-014 min readAlmost 30 years ago, two graduate students at Stanford University — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — began working on a research project they called Backrub. That, of course, was the project that resulted in Google. But also something more: it created the business model for the web.The deal that Google made with content creators was simple: let us copy your content for search, and we'll send you traffic. You, as a content creator, could then derive value from that traffic in one ...