[webwright]

This isn't true.

Google existed and grew (rapidly) for quite a while before they launched Adwords, which they introduced in 2000. Their growth in '99 was pretty meteoric (prompting a $25M investment from KP and Sequoia) before it rolled out PPC monetization. The Adwords model wasn't new at all-- Goto.com was the first search engine to bet on that model.

Google won because it was a massively better search engine... Not just 10% better-- it was "holy crap" better on a mess of fronts (notably: serving up what you were looking for).