jquery - a scripting tool. I'm not a programmer and I had scripting tools in Fortran. adwords - an advertising tool. Altavista, Jeeves, metacrawler and others all had said same. gmail - seriously? maps - mapquest was first in the consumer sphere, delorme beat Gmaps by 4-5 years. "search processor?" The google algorithm was an innovative approach but since 2001, Google has been tweaking the algorithm, not reinventing search. I worked a meeting with a VP from Google once. He told a large multinational corporation (under NDA) that Google's modus operandi is to move into a mature area of technology and suck all the profit out of it. They're deliberately not looking for places they can innovate - they're looking for low-hanging fruit they can pluck via brute force. Google Maps, for example, beat out Mapquest because Google was willing to invest in driving.every.road. That's not innovation. That's brute force.