What and how different was Google compared to other search engine that enabled it to dominate the other search engines?
In: Technology
For me it was the shift between just entering keywords to actually asking Google questions, which would then give you webpages that contained the answer. The intuitiveness of just saying “how do i” or “what is” was so different and it kinda stuck with me
AltaVista was excellent and had good Boolean logic. However, what really boosted Google was that with the mergers of DEC to Compaq and then to HP, the AltaVista indexes were not being updated anymore. So, for about 6 months there was not much of anything new being shown.
You must remember that Google’s total index was tiny compared to AltaVista. At least until that 6 month window. Google kept getting bigger and better on a daily basis.
By the time AltaVista indexes started updating again Google had met and was surpassing its total index and search results.
And the rest is history.
IMHO, if AltaVista hadn’t messed up and had stale indexes than the search engine wars may have turned out a little different. Perhaps Google would still have become dominant, but it may have taken a while longer.
[By spending billions of dollars each year forcing out their competitors and eventually getting sued by the us government](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-lawsuit?amp) for playing a giant game of monopoly with the biggest collective source of information in the world.
Existing search engines were full of adverts and took ages to load and generally painful to use. That Google also gave better results is probably the least important reason for it becoming popular. It was an order of magnitude quicker than anything else.
Before Google it was actually easiest to navigate the internet in a completely different way. The best way to find useful content was to find a vaguely related website via something like AltaVista then follow a whole series of links between pages as you refine what you’re looking for. Rather than just bouncing back to google and onto the next page.
Super Simple Interface, super fast, with the right “googlefu” perfect matches.
All others where a slow, bloated mess, that showed you outdated stuff that companys paid to display you there stuff, so you would visit them.
The “Don’t be Evil” Slogan was good, because you really thought the others where all evil….
A lot has changed since, but at least Google is still simple and fast … the other points, well, not so much.
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.
google’s biggest competitor at the time, yahoo, did use web crawling robots to scrape information for their searches, but really tried to act as a curated internet directory. Yahoo was organized like a yellow pages, like a physical phonebook. And yahoo search was so clunky that the directory might have been easier to interact with than the search.
Beyond pagerank and a clean interface, Google was about speed. There were other engines that returned results in seconds, but Google was instant (or as fast as instant was on slower connections). Speed was always one of the big advantages
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.
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