A long time ago, somewhere in 1999 I remember that a new hype was getting started. Webmasters were placing search promotion boxes of Google on their websites, and for what reason that was back then I am not really sure. It seems there was some sort of promotional scheme going on, it really seemed weird to me back then that a lot of people (here in The Netherlands) were placing a search promotion box on their websites for a new unknown search engine, while Altavista held the future back then as the biggest and best in search. Also I placed a Google search box on my website, also because altavista did not offer such a thing. However, I always wondered how this hype got all the way over to The Netherlands in those early days of the internet, while everyone was still believing in Altavista. Did Google start out with smart marketing? Or has the hype been caused by something else?
When you have deep pockets to get a business off the ground, advertising comes much easier no matter what country you want to target. They started out of a garage, look at them now...