Seeing what Google used to be 10 years back almost breaks my heart. It's hard to believe that this simple and crappy looking site (back in 98) would one day become a billion dollar marketing machine. http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
Smart and lucky. The fact that they were able to take over the search market after there were already other major search engines is unbelievable.