Remembering stuff like Yahoo! And Ask Jeeves, I wonder how Google came to be the company that became ubiquitous for and basically interchangeable with “online search”.
- Thanks for all the responses, everyone.
In the early days, the days of “don’t be evil”, Google’s PageRank algorithm was miles ahead of their competitors’ methods. Combined with a clean interface and unobtrusive text-only ads, clearly separated from search results, the site was a real pleasure to use.
They kept the front-zero-ads thing over the years, but once you click through a search, it’s a thousand times worse than the popups ever were. The first search page is a huge AI spash screen and the rest is sponsored placement mixed with random crap results to ensure you scroll all the way down looking for what you won’t ever really find.
I remember what you mean but Jeeves was lk delightful to see as well, he just looked so pleasant and helpful
Hehe, this classic.
Back in the day, I seem to recall using AltaVista before Google came along.
Anyway, most search engines back then were more like web portals, full of ads and annoying UI elements, they were treated more like a startpage than a simple search engine.
Then came Google, it was clean, it loaded fast, it got out of your way and let you focus on your work.
Then the actual search…
While other search engines had their tools to find the best result, none had done it with the care that Google did.
Every search engine had the same problem:
“How do we decide to rank the pages we scan to find if they are reputable or not?”
Someone at Google had a brilliant idea:
“Let’s simply check how many times a page is linked to from other pages!”
That is a really clever idea, back in the day websites were built by enthusiasts, people wanted to share what they found, so they made link pages to interesting and good sites.
Google used that data and put it into their page rank system to help users find the best result.
Better result lead to more users and so on.
Then it was time to monetize…
Just a few weeks ago I saw a photo of an article circa 1995 where Sergey brin says “other search engines care about monetization, we care about quality” or something like that
Or was it something like “you can’t give a good search experience if your focus is selling ads”?
they were the first to have a completely blank front page optimised to load as fast as possible. everyone elne packed their pages full of ads, news, and weather.
Prioritising search with the right result almost always on the first page. Stripped back interface. Back in the day search engines could be and often were a crapshoot, then along comes Google and surfaces what you are after first time the vast majority of times you used it. Plus the Google search page was a logo a text box and 2 buttons, you had to go looking for a weather report, a stock ticker, a news feed, an entertainment feed, etcetera etcetera. It was the disruptive tech upstart, now it’s the incumbent, basically all the evangelist algorithm nerds took their stock options and bailed. Now we have advertising obsessed business majors and cryptobros piloting the zombie husk of Google around.
Speed and pagerank. They served up results that other people with similar queries favored, and did it faster than anyone else.
My kid just ask “when am I going to get a computer password” momma said something about being in second grade so you’ll forget, you’ll get one later when you can remember it because you’re going to keep that cromebook until you’re in highschool.
To which I say, what the fuck. Schools need to get Linux and stop letting big companies get a foot into the door to our kids’ minds. Leave them alone. Don’t collect data on our kids!
I agree.
Google filtered through all the porn better.
Proof?
I was there and used it at the time.
i think some part of it is people themselves using word google as synonyme for search. And in general acting as if google was only search engine in existence.
But the point is there’s a reason that happened this way. The answer is Yahoo was a news site and had ads, and so did most others or they performed worse. Google worked and had nothing else on the homepage. Using Google as a verb is the result of that.
