Oversimplified to the point of absurdity. The original Google was based on Pagerank [1], which came out of the postgrad research of Larry and Sergey.
They also had to build a crawler, systems to calculate pagerank on relatively huge graphs, and the search engine.
That is years of decidedly non-trival hard work, both academic and engineering - pretty much the opposite of the 'snowball' the author claims it to be.
The snowball idea for Google was "download the web, keeping only the links" [1], and from there it grew into PageRank, sorting by PageRank, sorting by PageRank with a filter for keywords, a search engine, etc. The description in the article is largely bullshit; Google search has never used a database, and PageRank predates the idea of Google as a search engine.
[1] source: Larry Page, explaining to Nooglers why they shouldn't be afraid to work on ideas that seem crazy or useless at first.
They also had to build a crawler, systems to calculate pagerank on relatively huge graphs, and the search engine.
That is years of decidedly non-trival hard work, both academic and engineering - pretty much the opposite of the 'snowball' the author claims it to be.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank