How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company

How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company(techcrunch.com)

19 points by shreyanshd 7 years ago | 17 comments

mtmail 7 years ago |

Last years book "Never Lost Again" is a good account of the Keyhole/Google Earth/Google Maps story. (https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0062673041/)

nikolay 7 years ago |

TechCrunch has never been a good source of tech news - even from its Michael Arrington's days. But now it's even worse.

davidweatherall 7 years ago |

First time coming across techcrunch's "extra crunch" paywall - It's a shame they give you half the article before mentioning it.

mcintyre1994 7 years ago | |

I guess my AdBlocker blocked whatever they were trying to use to show the paywall, so the story just abruptly ended in the middle.

toby- 7 years ago | | |

Same. I use uBlock Origin, and the article just fades out in the centre...

Seeing as the other comments mention this website hijacking the back button and other nasties, I don't think I'm going to whitelist this site in uBlock to test, even temporarily.

drcongo 7 years ago |

Interesting side-note for anyone seeing a paywall, if you set Safari to only ever use reader mode on techcrunch URLs it appears to bypass that completely.

amanzi 7 years ago |

Got a few paragraphs in before finding out it's behind a paywall that's only accessible from a few countries.

sidcool 7 years ago |

Paywall alert. The article does not mention till very late that it's paywalled.

fs2 7 years ago |

What a horrible site, it tries to hijack the back button, full screen cookie warning and uBlock has over a dozen items blocked.

tchalla 7 years ago | |

It's so bad that I have stopped reading TechCrunch articles. The options for GDPR consent are excruciatingly painful to choose and takes a large time to even get to the appropriate point.

the_duke 7 years ago | | |

https://outline.com/KhBGXC

the_duke 7 years ago | |

Not only that, the GDPR settings take what is seemingly an infinite amount of clicks to actually see the options, and then you can't even properly opt out.

That was enough for me to skip this one.

kolla 7 years ago |

Techcrunch links should be banned imo..

drcongo 7 years ago | |

You are not alone.

Kiro 7 years ago | |

Why?

JustSomeNobody 7 years ago | | |

Well for one they hijack browser behavior. Their site is a train wreck of “me too” JavaScript development.