If Google's founders had done this, they would never have started the business, as at the time search was considered a poor market, already carved up between a few dominant players, and with no effective means of monetisation.
The Google founders kept trudging on because they had seen an anomaly that no one else had observed or no one else was willing to fix.
They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam.
In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.
