Google was a bad idea because at that time Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and all those "portals" were making money by keeping the traffic on their site instead of sending them away. They didn't even invest much on "search" as we know it because it's better if users generate more pageviews while trying to find something they want. Now google adsense and adwords sound so obvious but nobody knew they would be so powerful. Google was no doubt a cool "project" but no one knew how it would sustain itself (nowadays it's taken for granted you would make money by advertising but back then that was not so obvious probably) Same goes for Facebook. One big distinction between a company and project is company makes money and project doesn't necessarily have to.