Comment by golem14

Eh ... I question that 5% ranking is google's only contribution, even if it was important.

Everyone stood on the shoulders of file systems and databases, ethernet (and firewalls and netscreens, ...) Well, maybe a few stood on the shoulder of PHP.

Google did in fact pretty much figure out how to scale large number of servers (their racking, datacenters, clustering, global file systems etc) before most others did. I believe it was their ability to run the search engine cheap enough that enabled them to grow while largely retaining profitability early on.