I am pretty sure majority of the HN crowd was largely supportive of Google when it was founded.
But it was a different Google back then: pure no-ads search results (and remember, this was the time of banner ads and paid search placement). Heck, I wore a Google t-shirt I got from them proudly, and recommended all my non-techie friends and family switch to it from Yahoo and Altavista and whatnot.
It was only a few years down the line that, relying on word of mouth recommendations from geeks up to that point, they started considering ads as the business model.
But it was a different Google back then: pure no-ads search results (and remember, this was the time of banner ads and paid search placement). Heck, I wore a Google t-shirt I got from them proudly, and recommended all my non-techie friends and family switch to it from Yahoo and Altavista and whatnot.
It was only a few years down the line that, relying on word of mouth recommendations from geeks up to that point, they started considering ads as the business model.