What and how different was Google compared to other search engine that enabled it to dominate the other search engines?
In: Technology
In the 1990s finding stuff online was a pain the ass.
The way everyone envisioned that the internet would work was to have “portals” which were websites like Yahoo or AOL.
The idea was that you go online, go there, read the news, play games, check your email, whatever.
And if you wanted to find something specific you would use a collection of links organized by category, sort of like a yellow pages.
Yahoo also had its own search of course, but if you typed in a query, it would simply come up with a result that is exactly what you typed in.
Over time, this became very hard to use because very quickly a billion websites sprung up which were often irrelevant for what people were looking for.
Enter Google, which introduced its algorithm and page rank. The innovating thing was that Google devised ways to measure what people typing in a certain phrase or word are most likely looking for, based on what users click, and also the links of websites to other websites.
It didn’t just go off of just user input, it took other users’ behavior into account, and “relevance.”
It’s the same principle that science publishing uses – if a work in one journal is cited in 50 other journals, then that is considered an indication of relevance.
And another thing was the clean design. While Yahoo’s search was integrated with its portal and other Yahoo shit – which meant clutter – Google didn’t have that baggage as their only product was the search engine.
Search wasn’t treated as an add-on by a larger company, which in any case wanted to retain people on its own website as much as possible.
So Google had no ads, it was free of distractions and clutter, it was faster than all other engines, it was good at recognizing misspelled words, and you were far more likely to find whatever you were looking for quickly via Google.
And as more people used it, the algorithm just kept getting better, and it kind of spiralled from there, until pretty soon nobody gave a fuck about portals anymore because you could easily just Google to find whatever you want to do online, as it only took a second.
Google made search so easy and effective that it killed the whole portal and the yellow pages phonebook directory concept.
And it wasn’t just Yahoo, there were also other competing “portals” like Excite and Lycos.
Companies tried to retain users with services like Yahoo mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail – but then when Gmail came out that was the final nail in the coffin.
From the get go, it offered unlimited storage and if I recall correctly much larger attachments, which was unheard of at the time. Plus a powerful ability to search through your emails.
(This was obviously always a privacy nightmare, but this was before social media and smartphones, so most people just didn’t care. Google’s slogan was “Don’t be evil”, and everyone was fine with handing over their data if it makes navigating the internet easier.)
So yeah, it seems weird in 2024, but back then Google really had a superior product that literally everyone needed. 20 years ago they couldn’t just rely on the virtual monopoly that they have today, and using Google was a very useful and efficient way of doing things in the context of the time.
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