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”.
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.
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.
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. In this sense, we would say that the algorithm’s optimizing incentive is no longer aligned with the user’s interests, such as privacy or performance.
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 for the last decade, 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. And I often wonder if they have any idea too.
thats a good summary. my best guess with ai is people are already using it as some sort of confidant so for a certain segment of the population they are just going to know more about them than their own brain will allow them to about themselves.
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.
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.
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”?
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…
Yeah, and initially Google’s motto included “don’t be evil” so we all thought they were ethical…
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.
I loved Darklinks back in the day. She tried to being it back a few times but it never worked.
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.
This. And lightspeed.
I remember 30-ish years ago being in elementary school, when computers in the classroom were still kind of a new idea and we were first being trusted with access to the Internet. They brought one of the computer teachers into our classroom to teach us how to use them since not everyone had a home PC, let alone an Internet connection at the time.
One of the first things they taught us was about search engines. They mentioned the big five or six search engines at the time, which, if I recall, included yahoo, ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, lycos, hotbot, and I feel like there was one more. The school computer’s homepage was set to “yahooligans” which was sort of a kid-friendly yahoo homepage. They may have gone over some of the pros and cons of those different sites, but I don’t really remember what they were.
This was also right around the time that Google was brand-new and rapidly rising in the ranks. They mentioned Google, and I’m pretty sure what they said about it was that it was new, and it had the most search results.
And as a bunch of ~10 year olds, that was pretty much all we needed to hear, we might have given yahoo or ask Jeeves a try if we couldn’t find what we were looking for on Google, but Google was always our first try.
It had an advantage of having a kind of funny, and easy-to-remember name, which yahoo also had. I feel like around that age we also learned about “a googol” being a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros) so we had that word association of it being very big in our minds.
So for at least one classroom in my elementary school in Pennsylvania, that’s pretty much how it got its hooks in us.
From a broader perspective, Google had a very clean and simple interface. It loaded fast, there wasn’t a lot to distract you, it had that “I’m feeling lucky” button that gave it just enough light-hearted whimsy that it felt friendly and welcoming without feeling like too much of a novelty website. It was basically just a logo, a search bar, a couple buttons, and then some legalese and such at the bottom of the page. Even if you’d never used the Internet before then, if you managed to find your way to www.google.com you could probably figure out how to do a search from there. By comparison, if you went to, for example, Yahoo, you’d be greeted with a ton of other stuff on the homepage.
And, for a long time it was actually a really good search engine. It had a ton of results, and usually managed to put something relevant on the front page. It didn’t have obnoxious flashing ads or anything, and occasionally the “sponsored results” (ads) were even relevant and might have been exactly what you were searching for anyway.
They also had some good buzz about them as a company (and you can certainly argue about how much of that was deserved.) They had the “don’t be evil” thing going for them. You’d hear about the cool perks they had in their offices for their employees. Google seemed to be sort of the good guys of the internet for a while.
And they started branching out from search, and a lot of their other services were also pretty damn solid. There’s a reason that everyone and their mother uses Gmail - it’s free and it works as well or better than any other email provider you had at the time. I remember when I set up my Gmail account 20-ish years ago, my main email account was through Verizon since that was the internet provider my parents had. I feel like I had a lot of problems logging into that account and their website was always a little wonky and difficult to navigate. And at some point I think Verizon actually stopped offering email service and my parents had to migrate to something else anyway (and of course Gmail was the obvious choice)
And then they were big enough that they were an obvious choice to be the default search when that started to be something that was baked into web browsers. And then they even came out with their own browser that, at the time, seemed so much better than whatever else you were probably using at the time. Chrome is kind of a memory hog these days (or was the last time I used it) but I remember when it first came out it felt a lot snappier to me than Firefox or internet explorer did at the time. And again, it really simplified the interface, getting rid of some extraneous toolbars and such that no one really used anyway (and, at the time, websites getting you to install their toolbar or browser extension or whatever was sort of like how today they beg for you to get their app. If you looked at some random person’s browser there was a good chance they had 2 or 3 random extra toolbars installed that were probably full of spyware or outright viruses)
And of course, they have android, the only real competitor to iOS. With all of their stuff baked into it by default, further cementing a lot of people into the Google ecosystem.
I remember one of the biggest novelties was the number of Os ask l at the bottom like Goooooooooooogle. “Each o is a whole page full of results!”
Also about Gmail, it had a lot of storage compared to hotmail or yahoo where you had to delete old emails and if someone sent you a big attachment your inbox may become full and you stopped receiving emails until you did some cleanup. Gmail free storage was so big that some extensions treated it like cloud storage (i.e. gspace)
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.
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.
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!
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.
But people are still doing it
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.
Speed and pagerank. They served up results that other people with similar queries favored, and did it faster than anyone else.
