until adwords, what was the Google business model?

Three or four strong companies emerging from the carnage of thousands and thousands of others doesn't sound like any more now fun than it was the first time.

Wasn't it «being part of Stanford» originally?

Larry and Sergey started Google, at which time it was no longer a stanford research project, many years before AdWords.

In fact, they were very resistant to the idea of have any advertisements and were adamant in maintaining clean search results.