What and how different was Google compared to other search engine that enabled it to dominate the other search engines?
In: Technology
Google simply returned significantly better search results than the competition.
Other search engines at the time would do a full text search and return all web pages that contained the text you wanted, just like how you would search for a document on your computer. The pages where the word appeared more often would rank higher. This was a terrible signal, and could be very easily gamed (for example by adding invisible lists of words and phrases at the bottom of the page, which you can still find on very old sites).
Google was the first to use the concept of *backlinks*. They realized that your page was more important if other pages were linking to it. By creating this graph of links for the entire web, they were able to magically surface high quality results just by using a fundamental property of the internet – hyperlinks. (This is also why an early codename for Google was “backrub”).
I first heard about Google in 1999. Microsoft was a hated company back then and someone told me about this new search engine that uses an algorithm called “pagerank” that does not only indexes text in pages but also indexes links from other pages so that when you search for “the root of all evil”, it returns “Microsoft” as the first result.
No other search engine could do this at the time. I was hooked since day one.
Google is not a search engine. Google realized that being a search engine was not as profitable as being a marketing tool and selling the user as its product earlier than their competition.
Yahoo, Excite.com askjeeves were the three I used before Google became a thing. Even then, I was slow to get on that train.
Pre google there were 2 kinds of “search engines”.
There were ones like Yahoo. This was really more of a directory than a search engine. There was a category based hirechery, websites were put into those categories and you could brows through them or search through them.
The other kind was just a list of sites that contained the key words you were searching for.
Google’s big innovation was based on the list of references you get at the back of an academic paper. The founders of google figured out that if other pages referenced a page, that likely made that page more important.
This is how they came up with the pagerank process. Basiclly google would rank pages based on quality, how many links they got from other quality sites, how much other users clicked on those search results and so on. This ranking, more than just “does this website contain these search terms” but a “what of these 100 websites that contain the search terms is the best one, or the top 10”.
Once they had a better 10 blue links than the other guy, that’s how they attract all the users to their product. It was simply superior because it sought to rank the quality of the search results.
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