What and how different was Google compared to other search engine that enabled it to dominate the other search engines?
In: Technology
There’s some duplication between my answer and the others, but I have yet to see anyone mention point 3, and it alone helped to separate Google from the other search engines at the time.
1. Finding things that were actually useful / page rank.
At the time it was common for search engines to index pages based on the number of times a given keyword was listed on the page. A page featuring “Mother’s Day sale” forty times would be listed many pages before one that was restrained enough to mention it only once. This is probably a minor factor in why web pages at the time were so ugly and text heavy. Google was the first one to use a site’s reputation as a factor in the sorting algorithm. With Google a page on CNN is automatically more credible and more relevant than the exact same content on the geocities.com domain, and therefore would be shown higher in the search results.
Because search engines only matched the exact word or phrase, if you used a synonym or a common typo it would not return the page in the results. Did you search for “mother’s day” (no apostrophe)? Then you’d not receive any results for “Mother’s Day” (with the apostrophe) unless the typo missing the apostrophe was also on the page.
Last, but certainly not least, the search returned useful results. Think of an article that you saw on Reddit recently. Now use Reddit’s search to try to find it again based only on a few keywords that you remember. Odds are good that the article isn’t in the first page of results. Try using Google and adding “domain:Reddit.com” to the search and it’s likely the top result, even if you got the keywords slightly wrong. We call them search engines, but the goal isn’t to search, it’s to find. Google did finding vastly better than the competitors, and that’s a big deal.
2. A clean interface. Search engines at the time presented themselves as portals and wanted to be your homepage and serve you a slew of content, most of which was sure to be irrelevant (visit msn.com or yahoo.com today for a basic idea of what this looks like). The irrelevance, combined with the fact that connections and computers at the time were both vastly slower, and you have an idea of why this design was less appealing than Google’s clean interface.
3. A phrase preview on the search results page. At the time, it was common for search engine results to contain only the page title and perhaps the header or a few lines of text from the top of the page, and only the top of the page. Generally once you went to one of the results you’d have to use the client-side browser search to find the keyword you entered into the search engine, and often you’d find that the search result wasn’t relevant (e.g., searching for “moth” might take you to a page where the match was from the first four letters of the word “mother”). In contrast, Google would show the page title and then a preview of all of your keywords and the text on the page they matched (e.g., “…ode to my mother, who has always…”). This alone meant that from the search page you could more easily tell if the search result was relevant.
Latest Answers