Search: Google versus Microsoft 31 That's confirmed by one of the people who worked on Microsoft's search effort, who told me: `In the early days, search was just seen as a cost centre. It wasn't a way to make money. Nobody had figured it out.' Indeed, search engines seemed to contain an inherent contradiction: if you did it well, people would leave your site to go to the destination you'd served up ­ and, given the nature of search, that destination almost certainly wouldn't be a site you controlled (unless you tweaked the results, in which case you risked dissatisfying the user); there are more pages on the internet that aren't Yahoo.com or MSN.com or Askjeeves.com than those that are. That meant successful search engines lost the chance to serve up an advert. In pre-internet business terms, that's bad business. Yet that's not how the internet always functions. Yang's 1996 decision to reject Google was predicated on the idea that people wouldn't seek out better solutions to their problems online. And it ignored the idea that you create customer loyalty by giving them the best experience possible and that, if people found what they wanted through one search engine and