If he's the first employee, doesn't that mean he helped create the Google search engine, and thus changed the world? I think that's a lot closer to the truth than what you're implying. I don't think Google started worrying about advertising until years later.
I'd be interested in trying to figure out just how much Google Search changed the Internet, and by extension the world. How different would the Internet look if we were all still using AltaVista? Certainly it would be difficult for quality content to find viewers, as everyone used to pad their articles with thousands of keywords to jack up their rankings. What else would be different?
Google's been a great boon for the Internet, but i'm curious just how much Search changed things, on its own.
Websites would probably be stuck with "pay for inclusion" and all the other nastiness of the early days of search. Google also labeled our ads clearly; the FTC had to warn ~8 other search engines not to label paid results as "partner" listings and similar things. We also took a stand against pop-up ads in the early days when many other major search engines were doing pop-ups on their site. Not to mention that search engine spam was pretty bad in those days.
Certainly I'm glad that Google disclosed DMCA complaints (instead of dropping them, which every other major search engine did), push backed on overly broad DOJ subpoenas that tried to get 2 months of user queries, worked hard not to partner with scumware/malware companies, helped to push back on things like SOPA, and launched a transparency report to shine a light on government requests to take down information around the world.
Google has also been a major proponent of open source (e.g. Summer of Code, Android, Chromium), not to mention espousing principles like data liberation: http://www.dataliberation.org/ . Overall, I think the web would have been quite a bit worse without Google: slower, less organized, more closed, and definitely spammier.
I remember that when I was doing my startup, it occurred to me that I simply could not do it if Google did not exist. Several times a day, I'd Google for obscure library error messages or documentation for obscure libraries. Heck, I wouldn't even have known that those libraries existed, or that what we were trying to do was even possible, without Google.
This is a different topic but I think that while PageRank was a much better form of text search, the impact was minimal. Text search itself is quite silly when you think about it, and in the coming decades when we look back, I doubt if Google will be remembered at all.
