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.
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.
Oh I can totally do this one. So yahoo and excite were search engines but a they brought in having an account and a customized home page. Others did as well but I would say excite was bests followed by yahoo but yahoo introduced tabs to its interface which, I think, is the reason they won out at the time. Here is the thing. The engines where kinda simple. They crawled the web and searched through them. Now in 2000 I was at a conference and someone is like. oh man you have to use google its results are better. And it was very true. Later I learned it was because of an algorithm that the founders had that did this page ranking based on the number of links to it. It made a lot of sense as this is actually what you see in academia with papers. So they just applied it to the web in a much more automated way. Then adding synopsises of pages to the search results was a big thing but they were already dominating by then. oh and gmail got a lot of people to make accounts. they offered a gig of storage when 5meg was common and 100meg was massive. that really is what hit yahoo sa their thing was kinda the logged in experience. Adding free general office sotware and general sotware was a cherry on top to keep people on.
Ok. so now you got to understand that algorithms were generally viewed as positive back then. Google certainly went into customized ads but they were pretty decent at anonymizing it. So ads could be directed in general terms to the audience. Facebook is what brought it into the hyper engagement and very specific tracking of every aspect of you.
Ok. so now you got to understand that algorithms were generally viewed as positive back then.
The thing to keep in mind is that an algorithm is the instrument which optimizes for some incentive structure. In the early days of Google Search, the incentive was predominantly Adsense ads displayed alongside the search results. So to optimize views of these ads, the search algorithm had to be good enough so that people would keep coming back to Google Search for their web search needs. More users means more views means more eyeballs for ads.
What changed everything started with the incentive, when it became clear that marketers’ demands to hyper-target consumers could be met if websites like Google or Facebook could learn more about users than just the search terms they entered. This is when user tracking took off, where the incentive is now to monetize user habits and identity, ideally cross referenced to their social media profiles or login details.
With that new incentive, the way to optimize that is to use tracking cookies and to expand Google Analytics and AdSense so they appear on even more websites, each of which would report data back to Google as users moved around the web. Note how this means the quality of web search is no longer important, because whether or not the user lingers on Google Search, their habits are still recorded and monetizable.
Capitalism, as always, requires an examination into incentive structures, and this explains pretty much most of what Google has been doing vis-a-vis web behavior, with the notable exception of their Gemini AI. I readily admit that I have no idea how AI fits into their web search business model, apart from being a loss leader that keeps up the impression that they’re a major player in the current bubble.
This guy got it. Google was legitimately better at search. Google ads used to be viewed as being much less obnoxious than other ads. And Gmail was offering so much space people thought it was an April Fools joke for weeks
oh yeah. I forgot how it came out april first.
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.
Google filtered through all the porn better.
Proof?
Back in the day I used other search engines but they became more and more cluttered with a lot of flashing lights and colours. I started to use Google almost exclusively thereafter because it was simple and clean.
Same way you’re making me feel tonight. /jk
This is the reason right here. On dial up, you could do 20 searches on Google in the time it took Yahoo to finally load and let you do a search.
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.
Because it used to be good. Their search algorithm gave you more relevant results, they had no ads (and when they first introduced them, they were very unobtrusive), and their interface was clean and easy to understand.
They won the search engine war by being better at search compared to all the others.
…and not filling everything with ads. They had very little ads and the little ads they had were not obstructive in any manner. The ads were text, but also formatted in such a manner that it was extremely clear what is a search result and what is an ad. You could not really say the same about the search results of basically any competitor.
Basically, Google had understood what others had not: Filling the results page with ads drives customers to competitors.
I’d say something may have slightly changed in Google’s behaviour since those days, though!
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.
I remember what you mean but Jeeves was lk delightful to see as well, he just looked so pleasant and helpful
This. And lightspeed.
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.
Speed and pagerank. They served up results that other people with similar queries favored, and did it faster than anyone else.
It used to work
It used to be the best.
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.
The index of content available online, which they built and updated themselves. A policy of constantly tweaking the algorithm to make it understand what us monkeys want. No ads on the first search page. And then absolutely dominating the online ads market, which kept financing the continuous improvement to the service. Until they realised this was to their own detriment and made it ask Jeeves level competent again. They won the initial war but lost the peace.
I remember growing up with the earlier Search engine and then Google game along.
Google had massive selling points at the time: a clean interface that was quick to load (remember it was dial up era for most people!), unobtrusive text ads (most engines were filled with images pop ups and pop unders like the worst ad filled sites of today without ad blockers) and the key was tge search results were good. Pretty much ever search, you’d find something useful on the first page if not the first result. It was SO much easier than the other engines where you had trawl hard and keep changing your search terms.
Google made search easy and unobtrusive. I used to use AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and AskJeeves before google. Once google arrived I literally just used google - I didnt need to use 3 or 4 engines to get what I wanted.
The other search portals tried the trick of bundling email and chat clients and news etc. Google was just search, and then eventually an unobtrusive news tab. And when gmail launched email, they promised 1GB storage for free and forever increasing in size, with a clean interface.
Google won because they offered people what they wanted, without the in your face ads. And they really got in the background that the user is the product and monetized all our data - without us realising.
And they used their success to establish dominance, buying ad providers, veonf aggressive in selling ads, and crucially being successful in click throughs. People ignore colourful picture ads, theyre just annoying, but they click through sponsored search results.
Others have tried to copy the formula - look at Bing - but its hard to displace an encumbant. And the old guard like Yahoo and Lycos etc didnt adapt fast enough, or made huge mistakes in using google search themselves and just trying to be portals. People cut out those middle men fast.
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…
I loved Darklinks back in the day. She tried to being it back a few times but it never worked.
I remembered back in old day, we have link farm. Like we asked a bunch of blogger put our link on their page, and we did the same.
Yeah, and initially Google’s motto included “don’t be evil” so we all thought they were ethical…
Altavista and Excite… And sometimes HotBot if I wanted to be different
