You've oversimplified Overture's impact in relationship to Google's success. While it's true that Gross came up with the idea of ranking results based on who paid the most, the Overture search engine based on that idea was pretty useless, which is why Google was able to supplant them with all the major search clients, including Yahoo and AOL. Google's innovations to the auction model and the strength of it's organic search results are what made the company worth billions of dollars. Just because you developed a formula for glycerol, it's not until you add nitric and sulfuric acid that you get a substance that blows up in a big way.
You've oversimplified Overture's impact in relationship to Google's success. While it's true that Gross came up with the idea of ranking results based on who paid the most, the Overture search engine based on that idea was pretty useless, which is why Google was able to supplant them with all the major search clients, including Yahoo and AOL. Google's innovations to the auction model and the strength of it's organic search results are what made the company worth billions of dollars. Just because you developed a formula for glycerol, it's not until you add nitric and sulfuric acid that you get a substance that blows up in a big way.