One of my favorite things about HN is the way that you can find someone who has produced definitive proof of the non-existence of the public education system in an offhand comment.
Funding didn’t make them smarter, but it did buy the hardware to scale it. Other guys had the exact same idea at the exact same time like RankDex and IBM's HITS algorithm. Google just got the cash first to actually build the server farms to run it.
They used Stanfords existing infrastructure … I don’t think the grant they were on paid for it directly. Pretty sure the cluster was a resource shared by several labs
