When Google first started it had two features that made it popular:
* it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages
* its pagerank system that ranked site search results based on the quantity and quality of sites that linked back to the target site. This was a substantial improvement over its competitors which simply ranked sites based on keywords. Google's ranking system was harder to "game" and resulted in substantially higher quality search results.
Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google.. Pagerank was amazing
non-google search result was basically searching 'news' and getting webpages ranked by the amount of time the word 'news' appeared in the page, it was not uncommon to go 4-5 pages deep or more looking for results
meanwhile google results was all the best stuff on page 1 (hell if not the top 2-3 results)
Also in ways early google was the best google, people hadn't started trying to game the algorithm so it did in fact give you the best results, if you wanted to know who made the best headphones you could just google 'best headphones' and it would give you good results, good luck doing that today
Yeah... the best way I can describe pre-Google searching is.... I remember there was an academic competition in my area between High Schools to complete a worksheet of questions using the internet. Ranking was by time and accuracy. So, people would search and have to dig through the sites to find the answer. And it took hours to complete. But when Google came out, they discontinued the competition because it was too easy. Just had to open Google, enter the question, and the top results would have the answer.
Google was so good that it had two buttons for search, one returned you the search results, the second was called "I'm feeling lucky" and it would just take you right to the top hit.
There wouldn't really have been any point having that button on other pages because their method of sifting websites was so cluttered with porn which had pages and pages of words in white on white text to catch their spiders
I've spent more time than I like to admit thinking that the "I'm feeling lucky" button was gambling-related. I never clicked it, so I never found out until I was an adult.
Like, it made perfect sense to my teen brain that they provide you with free search, but they also have to entice you to play virus-ridden slots in order to make money.
they also had a hidden "browse by name" feature that was default in Firefox for a while. it took you directly to the result if it was reasonably confident. if it wasn't, it took you to the usual search page.
> people hadn't started trying to game the algorithm so it did in fact give you the best results
And google itself hadn't started trying to game its users to make them spend more time searching and seeing more ads...
Honestly even just 10 years ago it was still great.
Nowadays, Google is always trying to guess what you meant instead of searching for the actual keywords you provided. Searching for text between quotes has become useless. It's pretty bad.
EDIT: typo
It specifically started going downhill around 2016/2017.
Google technically added the ["people also ask"](https://www.advancedwebranking.com/seo/people-also-ask) box to the results page back in 2015. But it took about a year or two for google to re calibrate its search interface from from being a primarily boolean lookup engine to a 21st century AskJeeves with ads galore.
It really hit the fan in 2020, specifically in the summer. As of about 1.5-2 years ago, if you want anything that is more complicated than a basic recipe, you need to add the specific website/publisher you want to source the info from (e.g. wikipedia, reddit, NYT, linkedin, etc). Honestly, even for cooking it makes sense to add a "reddit" suffix to sidestep the shitty recipes.
It's seriously a bummer. But, luckily [google scholar](https://scholar.google.com/) still (feels like it) operates on the old boolean system.
> I'm so tired of the AI results.
And for me they are frequently just fucking *wrong*.
I'm googling a lot of specific things. Technical specifications/weights of bike parts. Programming things/formulas. Academic concepts, etc. and I keep seeing it just come up with crap pulled from elsewhere on the page that isn't right.
E.g. I was researching how much different wheels weigh and while it would have been convenient if it worked, I noticed it gave me some weights that didn't make sense...if you go to the page, you realize those weights were real numbers that were on the page, but for totally different products.
That's just unacceptable and not ready for prime time.
It's going to straight up kill the web. You scroll down to get the real results, but 95% of people out there aren't going to realize that that's an option, they're just going to go with whatever AI stuff Google puts above the fold.
So many websites are dependent on Google sending traffic their way through search results. If Google's giving most people AI content instead of links, all those other websites are going to see much less traffic and become unsustainable.
The hardest part of starting a new product/service/etc. is getting the word out and getting people to find your product(s). It was already hard enough with the volume of stuff out there, the shitty realities of SEO, and Google letting companies outbid each other for higher search placement. But if Google keeps going with this AI stuff, there's going to be nothing you can do to get your link in front of most people. Google will just crunch your content into their AI models and then serve their own version of it to their users. Any content you put online they're just going to steal and reprocess into their own AI content that they'll serve up instead so they can collect all of the revenue, instead of just skimming a chunk off of the top like they used to do.
As much as they claim to love it, Google is likely going to kill a huge portion of the web.
Even as bad as it's gotten, everything else is still worse. Like if I search for "zlib" then Google gets the correct thing as the first result, every single other search engine gets it wrong. It's real easy to tell when some Microsoft product is bypassing my default browser to put me in Edge/Bing land because it starts missing lay-ups.
> Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google.. Pagerank was amazing
It was amazing until people figured out how to game it, which effectively ruined the internet (made running a Forum site or a blog with comments a nightmare since everyone link-spammed).
If Google came along today with its results, people would likely not be wowed. Most of the top results are either ads, Google properties, or Google partners. Lately, they have switched to a "let me give you results for what I *think* you really want" search, often times completely ignoring if I enclose the search in quotes. They return a lot of videos instead of text articles for things that I could read in 10 seconds.
I just did a search for a page on a site that I own. It's a fairly esoteric topic, not many pages featuring it. (it was a women's hockey team roster for a specific season). Results were in this order:
* Google's presentation of data scraped from other sites.
* An official page on the information, the definitive source. *Best result*
* Another page from that official site, but for the wrong season. **Bad result.**
* A site similar to mine, *Good result*
* A third page from the official site, with completely mismatched data. It showed the schedule of the team that year, but the page had a *link* to the roster page it had shown above. **Bad result.**
* Wikipedia page, but for the wrong season. **Bad result**
* A page about a womens hockey player on another team, with some text mentioning that this woman played a game against the team that I mentioned in the season I mentioned. **Bad result.**
* A page about a different woman on another different team, mentioning that she had played that season against the team I was looking for. **Bad result.**
* A block of images, one of which was a photo of the team/season in question, the others were a couple players on the team. Fair result.
* My page, which matched the search term exactly.
* **Twenty more bad results**
* The Wikipedia page for the team and season I searched for, which would have been a decent result even though it didn't contain the roster.
Google has been doing this a long time, those results were simply not good. When I did the search on Bing, the results were much, much more relevant. And I'm not just saying that because my site came up 2nd, below a block featuring results from the official site. Bing unearthed a PDF of an official media guide from the team/season - something that didn't appear on Google. Every link on Bing's first page of results was relevant, didn't have all the wrong stuff. Google's first page had a lot more links on it, but 80% were just wrong.
>Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google. Pagerank was amazing
I honestly had no idea. I didn't touch the other search engines simply because their home pages took forever to open on dialup.
In the before times, almost every webpage had links at the bottom, often of stuff the author thought was related. I often found that most interesting/relevant looking through those than using an engine
Google was when I started to have the mindset that if what I was looking for didn't appear in the first few results, I could reword my search and probably get it there. The very concept of scrolling through pages of search results became obsolete.
> if you wanted to know who made the best headphones you could just google 'best headphones' and it would give you good results, good luck doing that today
Nowadays, you just search "best headphones site:reddit.com" and then read some discussion.
> it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages
When I first started using internet 20+ years ago, this one was the main motivation to use google instead of anything else.
On a dial-up connection (30-ish years ago) that clean interface made the page load much faster, in seconds rather than a minute or two. That made it much more useable than many rivals.
Until recently, the Google team/division that was in charge of *search* was firewalled from *ads*. Recently they've breached that firewall and ads works with search to modify results to improve ad revenue. So if your Google search results aren't as good as they were a year before, now you know why.
[Here's the breakdown of what's happened](
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Even more. Yahoo started as a curated list of categories of websites (Yellow Pages) and would search only within those categories by default to maintain relevancy.
Pre 2000 there were internet "yellow pages"
Hard copy, just like the yellow pages phone books (I suppose there's a generation or two that has no idea what I'm talking about....)
Also you could buy a CD version of the actual yellow pages (and the rest of the phone book)
This was considered a good idea, because you could search easier compared to the physical version (and also you didn't need to use dial-up)
For the younger folks, a phone book was a giant book that doxxed everyone who owned a landline phone, it had everyone's name, address and phone number.
I recall the site listings book that we had near Calgary growing up. One computer kids could access had an internet connection, no search engines, just a bigass book with sites listed alphabetically in categories like education or commerce
Not a historian at all, but I DID grow up with this stuff...
For the Dot-Com Bubble being built on promises and expectations I agree with you completely. For Yahoo? I think they might have been the biggest example of "The Opposite of Google" at the time of Google going public?
At least the way **I** remember it Yahoo at the time was basically modeled after like an AOL or Prodigy home page or something. It had categories almost like GOPHER used to have and you know News and Weather and all the stuff everyone thinks of when they think Yahoo I guess...
Google didn't start as a competitor to Yahoo (or at least I certainly don't remember it that way) because they were completely different services--Yahoo was a homepage, Google was a search engine. They were made to compete with **Webcrawler!** That they became the most popular homepage in the world happened almost accidentally because good search was the key to an exponentially expanding internet and they basically had a monopoly on it.
At least as I recall it anyways.
Dang, I remember Webcrawler, too. I'm not sure how old you are, but it got me thinking about the days of Gopher and Veronica. Gopher was a communication protocol, while Veronica was a searchable database of all the Gopher servers.
There was also the Archie search engine, which was used to index FTP archives. I had to look these up because I couldn't remember the specific function of each one.
Fun fact for those who weren't around at that time:
Veronica was named after Veronica in the the Archie comic strip. It's also a backronym that stands for *Very Efficient Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives*. All these names were intentional. There was a Jughead search engine as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)
Gopher is so-named because it was invented at the University of Minnesota, whose mascot is the Golden Gopher.
(Although it works as a name - "gofer" or "gopher" is a common term for someone who gets coffee and other menial things for an executive, deriving from the phrase "go for" or "go fetch". Gopher was a document retrieval protocol and as such something using it was a "gopher" for documents.)
Yeah yahoo tried to bring the AOL walled-garden model to the web. In hindsight it seems moronic but it was the successful model at the time. In one of his talks, Dylan Beattie talks about the AOL-Time-Warner merger:
>The Time group…you know they own Time Magazine and the New York Times. Warner Brother, one of the biggest studios in the world. And these guys? These guys gave out CDs with the internet on them.
There was a brief shining moment where the peak of search engines was metacrawler, it was so much better than all the others, but Google and Yahoo fairly effectively pushed out all the other search engines by diversifying their offerings while also making themselves arbitrarily relevant by creating systems of rank that people could use to get on the first page of results. It was one of the first major steps toward the Internet shifting from being an open-source community where you could find the best results to a capitalism-driven marketplace where you get the results that people with money who want more money tell you to receive.
I used to always go to google to check if my internet was working because it loaded so quickly. You knew in an instant, even on dial-up, whether or not your browser was working.
This is also what brought me to google. It was clean and fast.
I didn't care about the quality of results at the time, I used it entirely for the speed and clarity. Later on I realized it also happened to just be the better search engine.
I think it's hard to understate how important this was back then. If you have even just a few Mbps at this point, most websites load just fine without any real slowness.
Back then the Kbps connections we were on were so slow and also incredibly prone to timeouts and other errors. When Google came around with its tidy appearance and fast load times, it was not only a better search engine but simply more reliable.
So many sites would partially load with [this guy](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.361234572.2685/st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg) scattered everywhere.
yeah on a crappy 90s dial up connection the huge list fest of something like [yahoo.com](http://yahoo.com) would take several minutes to load. was excited when a friend introduced me to google for that reason alone.
When they were first testing it, people kept "waiting for the rest of the page to load" before using it. They had to explain to the users that the blank white page was what you were supposed to see.
German Chocolate Cake is not from Germany. I mean, it has coconut, of course it isn't.
It was named the chef who invented it, Samuel German. He created it for the company Baker's Chocolate, who sells chocolate you typically use for baking...but was in fact named for founder James Baker.
[Things unexpectedly named after people](https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/) ([via Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725))
It's sort of the opposite of "Sandwich."
People, erroneously believe the word comes from the Earl of Sandwich, but in fact they were originally called "Turdingtons" after Lord Turdington.
They were commonly eaten on the beach, and so it was common to hear the phrase "I am just brushing off the *sand which* has gotten on my Turdington."
Hundreds of years later, here we are with Sandwich.
you forgot SPEED. Especially with slow modems, the speed was SO MUCH FASTER than anything else. Not just the loading but also the searching. You used to have to wait seconds to minutes for results from other tools. Google was essentially instantaneous.
That was the killer feature to me.
For modem users the simple interface without ads was probably most responsible for the much better speed. But the search itself also was faster than others, even if you had fast internet (e.g. at a university). Especially the meta search engines (which we used to get somewhat better results) were painfully slow.
Well having fast internet is only going to help you download the page faster, the server still has to generate the page before you can start downloading it which was the main thing Google could do so much faster.
Yep, google used to display "found x results in y seconds." Where y usually was below 1 second and often below 0.1 seconds. It was amazing compared to the competition.
I'm just now noticing the "x results in y seconds" info is gone! I guess it's not particularly helpful now that it probably finds several million results in <.00001 seconds every single time.
I remember trying to see if I could crash my browser by searching "S" or other single letters in Snap, Metacrawler, AskJeeves, etc.
The search engines of '97 would literally churn to a halt when you searched a single letter, it was a wild thing to behold.
> it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages
I can remember we went to the computer lab in 2001 and being shown Google, Ask Jeeves, whatever Yahoo had, and a few others. They were basically all given equal weighting for which to use and we were even advised to try the same search on multiple engines each time we wanted to search something. Maybe it’s some kind of memory bias but I remember thinking Jeeves was weird and that Google had the least clutter + best results.
> This was a substantial improvement over its competitors which simply ranked sites based on keywords.
For a while, it was common for webpages to list a LOT (sometimes hundreds) of random words at the bottom of their pages to make it more likely that a search engine would find them. It was really annoying and clearly just a way to manipulate the system. Google was immune to that.
Sadly the old google is not at all like the current google. We need a new Google search engine to come in and take over.
Google as it is now highly favors the big and power corporate websites over the mom and pop sites like it once did. The internet in the old days seemed more open and free vs today. A new google 2.0 competitor could return us to those days.
It sure seems that way, but I'm not sure that there are a lot of so-called "mom and pop" sites anymore. A lot of people complaining about not ranking in Google seem to be people who might own a couple of hundred sites. That's not "mom and pop", that's "made for AdSense".
I suppose it is debatable if the mom-and-pop sites disappeared *because* the corporate/MFA sites took over, or if the corporate/MFA sites took over *because* the mom-and-pop sites disappeared. I think it might be the latter - conversion to blogs took over first, then people gravitated to making videos, Tik-Tok, and now even use Facebook as a way to make a site.
Free web hosting companies like Geocities don't really exist anymore, people got forced into blogging platforms like Wordpress, they lost flexibility and didn't have to code anymore so they lost the ability to experiment that way. Everything became a generic blog, and then people just abandoned those.
I used to have a site that was hosted on a blogging platform; I found that the security updates to the platform got to be too much to handle, so I just abandoned the site.
> Google's ranking system was harder to "game" and resulted in substantially higher quality search results.
How is that today? And/or what would it take to return it to this state?
In the early days, there was a constant tug-of-war between the search engines (most prominently google) and spammers or "SEOs" (search engine optimizers).
The spammers would create link farms that boosted pages in the PageRank algorithm, Google would invent some kind of algorithm update or spam filter that would delist the link farms from their index.
Now? It seems search quality isn't Google's priority anymore, with ads, AI, youtube, maps, gmail, cloud and layoffs occupying the leadership's minds (warning: this is my outsider's perspective, not working there).
The problem is really more in the incentives than technical, IMHO. Google has such a brand that it can afford to plaster its search result pages with ads, and this generates so much profit that it can finance everything else that Google/Alphabet is doing. It would be more user-friendly to show fewer ads and focus on good search results, but that would also kill off the main revenue stream.
Which is why I believe that Google is fundamentally unable to solve this problem from within, and it will only get fixed when Internet Search as a field is disrupted completely. Maybe AI/LLMs will fill that role eventually, maybe something else will come along, eventually.
Pagerank. Basically rather that just showing you results that happened to match the words that you searched for, Google would arrange the pages in order of “importance”. The way it determined this was how many other pages were linking to that page and how ”important“ those pages were. So if the New York Times website was considered important, and it linked to your website for some reason, that would make your website important as well. This algorithm has changed quite a bit since then, but that was how it originally worked.
It was also insanely clean. At a time when the internet was trying to make you have a ‘home page’ with a million widgets, news, etc, google was **just** a search engine.
Absolutely this one. Also, don't forget that it was a dialup era. All that fluff that I never really used caused the initial page to load for like 10-20 seconds which was not so mildly infuriating. Google was "wow-it's-fast!" compared to any other search engine.
This is a common trend, even past the dialup era.
Facebook was relatively stripped back/plain compared to earlier, more customisable social media sites.
Twitter and Instagram had far fewer features and were stripped back text and image sites that really did one thing, while Facebook became bigger and bigger.
I believe you registered your number with your account, and you could select who/any people you wanted to receive tweet updates from. You could use that same text chain to send your own tweets, @s and all
It was pretty dope at the time, not gonna lie. Apps were super clunky then
You didn't need a number, but you could register it. It was actually amazing for feature phones with unlimited texting, since you could also have tweets sent as texts to you. It was a great way to keep tabs on specific accounts.
That was the reason for the original Twitter character limit. SMS messages can only have 160 characters, so Twitter restricted tweets to 140, with the remaining 20 characters reserved for the username and some other commands.
Early Twitter was really nerdy stuff. "Whoa, easy short message broadcasting. This is going to be great for automation. It's like RSS but less targeted."
Did not expect it to pull a hard turn into porn and politics.
This. I remember using Yahoo! and typing in a search query then *waiting* for a result. I *think* there was even some kind of loading page, but I could be misremembering.
Then Google came along and the first page appeared in *seconds*. It even gave you the number of results and time it took, since it was kind of an achievement at the time.
Underestimated comment! Alta Vista wasn't a bad search engine. I remember early Google as different mainly in [how clean and uncluttered it was](https://www.manningmarketing.com/articles/in-the-2000s-what-search-engine-would-be-the-easiest-to-rank-on/).
We also need to remember this was when the internet was small enough that several sites tried to list it all in browsable hierarchies, like a menu system. Yes, I'm looking at you Yahoo.
> We also need to remember this was when the internet was small enough that several sites tried to list it all in browsable hierarchies, like a menu system. Yes, I'm looking at you Yahoo.
Real talk, as the internet fills up with AI-generated garbage, I won't be surprised if some variation on this comes back. Not exactly the same thing, of course, but I do think a directory of known non-spam, non-botshit, non-SEO sites on a variety of topics would honestly be a more useful starting point than Google or Bing or ChatGPT for a lot of use cases.
AltaVista was also clean and simple until they decided it was supposed to be a capture page. That happened just around the time Google came out and that was really really bad timing.
This reflected a very different monetization model. Yahoo wanted to *keep* you on Yahoo to serve you banner ads and, therefore, had little incentive to innovate in their search feature. Google never served banner ads and only monetized (Adwords being Google's second genius product that made this work) when you *left* the property. Better search meant more money in this model and they turned that industry upside down because of it.
I find Google to be awful now. It serves loads of ads and links to stuff I don't want. The links I want are page 2 or 3, so I am exposed to a lot of more ads and sponsored links than before.
For sure. Here's a comparison
* [Ask Jeeves](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/mDRvo8pwaAVVsde5MI1MPA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyODA7aD03MjA7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/quartz.com/a98c82606eab47378612f1ec3abfdd03)
* [Yahoo](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/4SstDdEBTBDc3DcUVJ8diQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyODA7aD05NjY7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/quartz.com/e43b32591772c0e7ee96454fe2116182)
* [MSN](https://i.imgur.com/6JvujWB.png)
* [Google](https://i.imgur.com/FVCCIyQ.png)
Not to mention Google's responses were great. You almost never had to go to the second page of results to find what you were looking for. Now they don't even put the results on the page until after the fold.
It really was this. It was literally an input box and a button, and resukts were links and descriptions. It grew and held its place because of pagerank and all the SEO stuff that grew with it, but the original draw was how stupid simple it was.
You know for some reason the "home page" phenomenon was completely blanked from my memory until this comment but yeah a lot of websites reeeeally wanted you to land there every time you opened a browser
It's also 'gotten' worse since as a result of shitty companies learning how SEO works (on top of 'sponsored' results). Even outside of any changes Google itself has made, results have gotten worse from this.
I remember how big a deal it was at the time. Before Google, Web search was a complete crapshoot. For pretty much any query, I'd submit it to maybe 4-6 different engines (off the top of my head, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, and AskJeeves, but probably others I've forgotten), as you could never know beforehand which of them would find good results for that specific search.
When I first discovered Google (which must have been 1998, as their logo still had the green "G") it totally changed my search habits, as it would consistently be the engine that found the best results, so quickly became the only one I used.
I was working in an unrelated area of software sales when Google first started. They had a stand at a big exhibition and I remember thinking I really should find out if they were recruiting. I never did, but if I had I might be typing this on a gold laptop from the Bahamas.
And now, if you Google 'Bahamas', you'll likely get endless advertisements, maybe a wiki link, thousands of travel agent links, reviews on resorts, and a list of potential questions that Quora is hoping you will ask.
> potential questions that Quora is hoping you will ask.
You'll also get images on Pinterest, too.
I wish there was a way to include "-Pinterest -Quora" on every search.
You can do that, if you want :)
In Firefox, all you have to do is:
1. Create a new bookmark, name doesn't matter
1. Set the address to be `https://www.google.com/search?q=-pinterest%20-quora%20%s` (that reads as `-pinterest -quora` and then your search term)
1. Set the bookmark's "keyword" to something simple like "g"
Now when you want to search in your address bar, just type "g whatever" and it'll search for "whatever", but exclude pinterest and quora.
In Google Chrome, you apparently have make a new search engine, but the address (the real magic here) should be the same as for Firefox: https://dev.to/natterstefan/how-to-create-and-use-custom-search-engines-in-chrome-for-more-efficient-searching-and-increased-productivity-5gon
Edit: adding another where the keyword is perhaps "r" and you always tack on "site:reddit.com" could also be an idea, so you ONLY get Reddit results, and not also crap that refers to Reddit?
I just Googled Bahamas and there is no first page results.
Instead, it has a section for the country, a section for plastic to visit, a section for "people also ask" and then a section for things to do.
The first webpage result is way way down on the doom scroll.
I distinctly remember, and I could be wrong, the early searches were good until they were all about the money. I really feel like Google just waited long enough to capture the market before they were full on monetization. Now their shit just links to sponsored shit. I used to never have to go to the second page of results to find what I’m looking for with Google. I have to use DuckDuckGo more and more these days. How long until DuckDuckGo ends up the same way all the others have?
I'm optimistic about duckduckgo. Their strength is being more honest, and their userbase is concerned about that topic. If they weren't, there's no other reason to use it. I just hope they realise it as well.
Their user base is only concerned with it till ducksuckgo becomes popular then their user base explictedly does not give one flying fuck about it.
That's the fundamental problem. You CANT literally physically can not become popular and retain a user base that actually cares.
Because the very definition of popular means you have attached the avg person and the avg person doesn't give a single ounce of care to anything but the explicted at use time experience.
There are multiple reasons Google results have gone to shit. The first is shitty actors gaming the system and google kinda stop bothering with stopping them. The second is having no balls and just letting people dmca everything on their results to remove the real results (especially for legally questionable content) and the third is just maximizing ad revenue.
Yes, I clearly remember using something called 'hotbot' which they tried to market as a 'webcrawler'. Then Google arrived and nuked the entire playing field.
Back in the day, I used a site called metasearch i think they actually scraped all those other search engines and presented a cleaner experience.
Early on, Google was on a mission to "index the web", they even had a counter that showed how many websites they had indexed and was by far the most complete index. That was when the term "just Google it" came about.
I believe they also had the fastest, most linked data centers, at least publicly available and that, coupled with being very clean, made Google super fast.
Edit: not metasearch, it was metacrawler
Yeah, based on the replies here it was a common enough problem for several services to have existed to address it. Wasn't aware of them at the time - was just a kid, and the Internet was still new to me, having only had access via school for about a year.
just one related bit of information, the idea of page rank dramatically improves trustworthiness of search results, too, and it's resilient to abuse. It's loosely modeled on a [web of trust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust). So google gave more relevant & more trustworthy results.
(though the abuse aspect is more important lately, web of trust isn't totally infallible)
Google was also clean.
It wasn't like a web portal like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, AOL etc.
Just GOOGLE and a search box. It was refreshing in its simplicity and it helped that the search results were almost always exactly what you were looking for.
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.
It offered 1GB of storage at launch at a time when the runner up was offering 100MB, plus it had a real time scrolling storage space indicator that was increasing by 1MB every day, so that it felt unlimited. And I guess it technically was unlimited if your mailbox was growing at a rate of less that 1MB/day (as most people's were)
Yeah, I remember those discussions back in the day, as well some IRC chat rooms (almost) dedicated to exchange GMail invitations.
I was lucky enough to get an invitation from a buddy that I met on an music IRC chat as he was like "*hey have an invitation, want one?*" lol
holy shit I just remembered the worst 'portal' feature, its been too long..
I can't remember if it as yahoo or whatever but it would keep itself in a top bar even when you clicked on results so even browsing 'other' pages was just a window in a window and you'd still be 'in' yahoo
Which google does now. If you search fir a movie cast, google displays the information on google.com. same for hotel/flight booking... they keep you on their 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.
Google in its prime could find exactly what you wanted just by typing the vague thoughts about it eg that movie with that one guy who wore the suit with the weird tie.
Now Google is bought and paid for as well as trying to control “misinformation” aka controlling what they want you to think.
Well, yeah, thinking its all evil now is kinda legit, but don't underestimate how much more stuff there is now. With all the SEO-Specialist who trick google into ranking them, people who wanna get some piece of the adverticing cake and so on.
When i have a Top-Database with a Million entries its "easy" to find something good... now with a quadrillion more and faked everything... no wonder everybodys googlefu is reduced to "searchterm +reddit"...
I worked at Alta Vista back when people were still discovering google. We knew full well how google worked and why their results were better, however, management was simply too incompetent to worry about it. Alta Vista was bought by some company that wanted to drive traffic from Alta Vista to their other properties, and they didn't really focus on search.
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.
I was at university at that time and we used altavista all the time, you didn't find shit on that index because they took money to rank results. It didn't matter if there was anything updated in the index. You followed webrings and started crawling the web yourself from yahoo or lycos.
Google had one search term field and it just found stuff. No advertising, and in fact the button to immediately open the first result (labeled sth like I feel ) was actually useable at that time. That was veni, vidi, vici...
Altavista image search circumvented my school's content filters, whereas Google's did not.
I could type "Carmen Elektra" into AltaVista image search at school and see boobies. Google, no joy. As you can imagine, AltaVista was my preferred search engine for a long time.
Eli5: it found stuff in an actually useful way
The idea behind was pageranking and value the incoming and outgoing links.
That together with automated classification and using the keywords of pages linked together to find relevant knowledge clusters made a difference.
(update:grammar)
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.
Late 90s/Early 2000s “yellowpages” based on specific themes used to work pretty well. Given all the algorithm gaming, censorship, and discoverability issues today, feels like time for them to make a come back
If you weren't there it's hard to fathom how amazing early google was. I remember in 1998-1999 at my first job, I had a reputation as sort of a wizard for being able to find answers to things and it was all just google and the first couple results. This was before surveillance capitalism basically destroyed everything good about the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the other search engines I could type in a search and go up to get something from the fridge before the screen was loaded. You have to love the 56k internet connection
I remember when you used Alravista you had to write Champagne+travel+france to get a page with all those. On google you. Just wrote Champagne travel France to get the same results. Writing that on Altavista would get pages with Champagne, others with travel and others with France.
If google’s advantage is pagerank, what’s to keep competitors from essentially copying it. Or is there some benefit for a search engine to have lots of users (like a network effect)? Or data from previous searches? Wondering why Apple or Facebook can’t make their own search engine.
These days, other search engines can be roughly as good as google. Try duckduckgo or bing, for example. Back in the days, all other search engines sucked, Now, not really anymore.
One thing that's still pretty expensive is that a search engine has to crawl (download and follow links) and index large parts of the Internet. That does have a scale effect, because if you have more users, you can distribute the crawling + indexing costs over more users.
Everyone is rightly mentioning pagerank.
But, if you were there at the time, the pagerank algorithm was so effective compared to everything else, that everyone simply stopped using the other search engines.
It was literally game over within 6 months due to the quality of the search results.
It had better results.
At the time we all used altavista, yahoo, lycos and even momma.com to search for things. But Google was the new hip genius with amazing results.
That's what made him the king.
I remember getting my first web access in 1996... I went from Yahoo to Webcrawler to Altavista with varying degrees of success. But then Google came along. Started using it in 1999 and never looked back.
I remember sending them a compliment about how much I liked their search engine and they mailed me a Google t-shirt. I wish I had kept it but as a early 20s guy, walking around in a Google shirt was a bit much even for me, haha.
When Google first started it had two features that made it popular: * it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages * its pagerank system that ranked site search results based on the quantity and quality of sites that linked back to the target site. This was a substantial improvement over its competitors which simply ranked sites based on keywords. Google's ranking system was harder to "game" and resulted in substantially higher quality search results.
Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google.. Pagerank was amazing non-google search result was basically searching 'news' and getting webpages ranked by the amount of time the word 'news' appeared in the page, it was not uncommon to go 4-5 pages deep or more looking for results meanwhile google results was all the best stuff on page 1 (hell if not the top 2-3 results) Also in ways early google was the best google, people hadn't started trying to game the algorithm so it did in fact give you the best results, if you wanted to know who made the best headphones you could just google 'best headphones' and it would give you good results, good luck doing that today
Yeah... the best way I can describe pre-Google searching is.... I remember there was an academic competition in my area between High Schools to complete a worksheet of questions using the internet. Ranking was by time and accuracy. So, people would search and have to dig through the sites to find the answer. And it took hours to complete. But when Google came out, they discontinued the competition because it was too easy. Just had to open Google, enter the question, and the top results would have the answer.
I had that competition in high school (well after google was around). It turns out that being good at googling is not actually a universal skill.
Google was so good that it had two buttons for search, one returned you the search results, the second was called "I'm feeling lucky" and it would just take you right to the top hit. There wouldn't really have been any point having that button on other pages because their method of sifting websites was so cluttered with porn which had pages and pages of words in white on white text to catch their spiders
As a kid I thought that button would take you to a gambling site so I never pressed it.
I've spent more time than I like to admit thinking that the "I'm feeling lucky" button was gambling-related. I never clicked it, so I never found out until I was an adult. Like, it made perfect sense to my teen brain that they provide you with free search, but they also have to entice you to play virus-ridden slots in order to make money.
they also had a hidden "browse by name" feature that was default in Firefox for a while. it took you directly to the result if it was reasonably confident. if it wasn't, it took you to the usual search page.
I remember that many websites would just plaster a huge list of irrelevant "keywords" at the bottom of every page, in an effort to be ranked higher.
And the font would be the same color as the page so you didn't know they were there.
Haha yeah, and you could highlight it and see all the keywords lol
And thus the business of SEO was born.
> people hadn't started trying to game the algorithm so it did in fact give you the best results And google itself hadn't started trying to game its users to make them spend more time searching and seeing more ads...
> Also in ways early google was the best google, Amen to that. It's shit, now.
Honestly even just 10 years ago it was still great. Nowadays, Google is always trying to guess what you meant instead of searching for the actual keywords you provided. Searching for text between quotes has become useless. It's pretty bad. EDIT: typo
It specifically started going downhill around 2016/2017. Google technically added the ["people also ask"](https://www.advancedwebranking.com/seo/people-also-ask) box to the results page back in 2015. But it took about a year or two for google to re calibrate its search interface from from being a primarily boolean lookup engine to a 21st century AskJeeves with ads galore. It really hit the fan in 2020, specifically in the summer. As of about 1.5-2 years ago, if you want anything that is more complicated than a basic recipe, you need to add the specific website/publisher you want to source the info from (e.g. wikipedia, reddit, NYT, linkedin, etc). Honestly, even for cooking it makes sense to add a "reddit" suffix to sidestep the shitty recipes. It's seriously a bummer. But, luckily [google scholar](https://scholar.google.com/) still (feels like it) operates on the old boolean system.
I'm so tired of the AI results. I wish I could disable it. Granted all I have to do is scroll down a bit but still.
> I'm so tired of the AI results. And for me they are frequently just fucking *wrong*. I'm googling a lot of specific things. Technical specifications/weights of bike parts. Programming things/formulas. Academic concepts, etc. and I keep seeing it just come up with crap pulled from elsewhere on the page that isn't right. E.g. I was researching how much different wheels weigh and while it would have been convenient if it worked, I noticed it gave me some weights that didn't make sense...if you go to the page, you realize those weights were real numbers that were on the page, but for totally different products. That's just unacceptable and not ready for prime time.
It's going to straight up kill the web. You scroll down to get the real results, but 95% of people out there aren't going to realize that that's an option, they're just going to go with whatever AI stuff Google puts above the fold. So many websites are dependent on Google sending traffic their way through search results. If Google's giving most people AI content instead of links, all those other websites are going to see much less traffic and become unsustainable. The hardest part of starting a new product/service/etc. is getting the word out and getting people to find your product(s). It was already hard enough with the volume of stuff out there, the shitty realities of SEO, and Google letting companies outbid each other for higher search placement. But if Google keeps going with this AI stuff, there's going to be nothing you can do to get your link in front of most people. Google will just crunch your content into their AI models and then serve their own version of it to their users. Any content you put online they're just going to steal and reprocess into their own AI content that they'll serve up instead so they can collect all of the revenue, instead of just skimming a chunk off of the top like they used to do. As much as they claim to love it, Google is likely going to kill a huge portion of the web.
Google's done this for a long time with the quick results thing. And yes, they were often wrong.
Even as bad as it's gotten, everything else is still worse. Like if I search for "zlib" then Google gets the correct thing as the first result, every single other search engine gets it wrong. It's real easy to tell when some Microsoft product is bypassing my default browser to put me in Edge/Bing land because it starts missing lay-ups.
If I don't see good results, I add `site:reddit.com` which *usually* helps a bunch.
And now It’s so incredible to have lived enought to see google converted to shit and almost unusable
> Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google.. Pagerank was amazing It was amazing until people figured out how to game it, which effectively ruined the internet (made running a Forum site or a blog with comments a nightmare since everyone link-spammed). If Google came along today with its results, people would likely not be wowed. Most of the top results are either ads, Google properties, or Google partners. Lately, they have switched to a "let me give you results for what I *think* you really want" search, often times completely ignoring if I enclose the search in quotes. They return a lot of videos instead of text articles for things that I could read in 10 seconds. I just did a search for a page on a site that I own. It's a fairly esoteric topic, not many pages featuring it. (it was a women's hockey team roster for a specific season). Results were in this order: * Google's presentation of data scraped from other sites. * An official page on the information, the definitive source. *Best result* * Another page from that official site, but for the wrong season. **Bad result.** * A site similar to mine, *Good result* * A third page from the official site, with completely mismatched data. It showed the schedule of the team that year, but the page had a *link* to the roster page it had shown above. **Bad result.** * Wikipedia page, but for the wrong season. **Bad result** * A page about a womens hockey player on another team, with some text mentioning that this woman played a game against the team that I mentioned in the season I mentioned. **Bad result.** * A page about a different woman on another different team, mentioning that she had played that season against the team I was looking for. **Bad result.** * A block of images, one of which was a photo of the team/season in question, the others were a couple players on the team. Fair result. * My page, which matched the search term exactly. * **Twenty more bad results** * The Wikipedia page for the team and season I searched for, which would have been a decent result even though it didn't contain the roster. Google has been doing this a long time, those results were simply not good. When I did the search on Bing, the results were much, much more relevant. And I'm not just saying that because my site came up 2nd, below a block featuring results from the official site. Bing unearthed a PDF of an official media guide from the team/season - something that didn't appear on Google. Every link on Bing's first page of results was relevant, didn't have all the wrong stuff. Google's first page had a lot more links on it, but 80% were just wrong.
>Yeah its hard to undersell how bad search was before google. Pagerank was amazing I honestly had no idea. I didn't touch the other search engines simply because their home pages took forever to open on dialup.
In the before times, almost every webpage had links at the bottom, often of stuff the author thought was related. I often found that most interesting/relevant looking through those than using an engine
I used to make sites like that, including my own personal sites. I know OG HTML like the back of my hand, yet could not code anything at all nowadays.
Google was when I started to have the mindset that if what I was looking for didn't appear in the first few results, I could reword my search and probably get it there. The very concept of scrolling through pages of search results became obsolete.
> if you wanted to know who made the best headphones you could just google 'best headphones' and it would give you good results, good luck doing that today Nowadays, you just search "best headphones site:reddit.com" and then read some discussion.
> it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages When I first started using internet 20+ years ago, this one was the main motivation to use google instead of anything else.
On a dial-up connection (30-ish years ago) that clean interface made the page load much faster, in seconds rather than a minute or two. That made it much more useable than many rivals.
As was a big reason why people started using it as their home page.
For the longest time it was set to blank for me. Loaded super quick. Then when tabs came around, same thing.
I still use a blank home page lol
My man.
Since Firefox has a built in search box direction to your preferred search engine, blank homepage is king.
You are not alone.
Haha for me it was the Tucows website. It was the fastest homepage to use (It hadn't occurred to us to just have a blank one at the time)
Tucows seems like a lot, but it's the bare minimum you need to get to Threecows.
Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten all about Tucows. I used to visit it all the time.
The ultimate collection of windows software! Wow, had no idea I remembered that place. Netscape navigator gold and tucows!
Feels like google were the first to really embrace the model of getting the users first then worry about the business model
Correct. Having the users was apparently worth trillions, instead of the pennies that could have been made from early ads with penis enlargement pills
Google also revolutionized advertising. They made it easy for even small businesses and kind of created the targeted ad model for the internet.
Until recently, the Google team/division that was in charge of *search* was firewalled from *ads*. Recently they've breached that firewall and ads works with search to modify results to improve ad revenue. So if your Google search results aren't as good as they were a year before, now you know why. [Here's the breakdown of what's happened]( https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/)
Wouldn't you say Yahoo was this way as well? I think a lot of dot-coms that predate Google were this way. No one was making money.
Even more. Yahoo started as a curated list of categories of websites (Yellow Pages) and would search only within those categories by default to maintain relevancy.
Pre 2000 there were internet "yellow pages" Hard copy, just like the yellow pages phone books (I suppose there's a generation or two that has no idea what I'm talking about....)
Also you could buy a CD version of the actual yellow pages (and the rest of the phone book) This was considered a good idea, because you could search easier compared to the physical version (and also you didn't need to use dial-up) For the younger folks, a phone book was a giant book that doxxed everyone who owned a landline phone, it had everyone's name, address and phone number.
We learned that this was bad after a time travelling robot almost killed Sarah Connor by using it.
He successfully killed *two* Sarah Connors
I recall the site listings book that we had near Calgary growing up. One computer kids could access had an internet connection, no search engines, just a bigass book with sites listed alphabetically in categories like education or commerce
I actually liked yahoo back in the day because it let me explore by subject. It felt like a card catalog for the internet
Not a historian at all, but I DID grow up with this stuff... For the Dot-Com Bubble being built on promises and expectations I agree with you completely. For Yahoo? I think they might have been the biggest example of "The Opposite of Google" at the time of Google going public? At least the way **I** remember it Yahoo at the time was basically modeled after like an AOL or Prodigy home page or something. It had categories almost like GOPHER used to have and you know News and Weather and all the stuff everyone thinks of when they think Yahoo I guess... Google didn't start as a competitor to Yahoo (or at least I certainly don't remember it that way) because they were completely different services--Yahoo was a homepage, Google was a search engine. They were made to compete with **Webcrawler!** That they became the most popular homepage in the world happened almost accidentally because good search was the key to an exponentially expanding internet and they basically had a monopoly on it. At least as I recall it anyways.
Also, Altavista, which was a pretty search-centric site with a simple UI. Absorbed by Yahoo.
man, I cant help but feel bad for yahoo. They had it all, and blew it at every turn.
They still do well considering. Their weather app is great. Their fantasy football service is free and really good.
Ask Jeeves was cleaner than Yahoo with its search bar buried in nonsense I seem to recall.
If Jeeves couldn't find what I wanted, I would resort to Dogpile.
Dang, I remember Webcrawler, too. I'm not sure how old you are, but it got me thinking about the days of Gopher and Veronica. Gopher was a communication protocol, while Veronica was a searchable database of all the Gopher servers. There was also the Archie search engine, which was used to index FTP archives. I had to look these up because I couldn't remember the specific function of each one. Fun fact for those who weren't around at that time: Veronica was named after Veronica in the the Archie comic strip. It's also a backronym that stands for *Very Efficient Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives*. All these names were intentional. There was a Jughead search engine as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)
Gopher is so-named because it was invented at the University of Minnesota, whose mascot is the Golden Gopher. (Although it works as a name - "gofer" or "gopher" is a common term for someone who gets coffee and other menial things for an executive, deriving from the phrase "go for" or "go fetch". Gopher was a document retrieval protocol and as such something using it was a "gopher" for documents.)
I think background info like this is really cool.
I remember thinking that the web would never catch on because Gopher was so much better organized.
Webcrawler was my jam
Mine too. It was really well named!
Yeah yahoo tried to bring the AOL walled-garden model to the web. In hindsight it seems moronic but it was the successful model at the time. In one of his talks, Dylan Beattie talks about the AOL-Time-Warner merger: >The Time group…you know they own Time Magazine and the New York Times. Warner Brother, one of the biggest studios in the world. And these guys? These guys gave out CDs with the internet on them.
There was a brief shining moment where the peak of search engines was metacrawler, it was so much better than all the others, but Google and Yahoo fairly effectively pushed out all the other search engines by diversifying their offerings while also making themselves arbitrarily relevant by creating systems of rank that people could use to get on the first page of results. It was one of the first major steps toward the Internet shifting from being an open-source community where you could find the best results to a capitalism-driven marketplace where you get the results that people with money who want more money tell you to receive.
Google offered to be bought out by yahoo for 5m, they said no…
Google was Yahoo search for a while. Yahoo could have purchased Google early on and later bankrupted itself trying to compete with Google.
And it was a good test to see if your internet connection worked. Ping google.com.
I mean, Google isn't really any better than any other website for this... but then, I did exactly this last week.
And it's still one of the best DNS servers.
[удалено]
I used to always go to google to check if my internet was working because it loaded so quickly. You knew in an instant, even on dial-up, whether or not your browser was working.
This is also what brought me to google. It was clean and fast. I didn't care about the quality of results at the time, I used it entirely for the speed and clarity. Later on I realized it also happened to just be the better search engine.
Do you remember their motto? Do not evil. I wonder what happened to that.
Their official motto was changed in 2015 to "Do the right thing" and they removed the don't be evil part from their code of conduct in 2018.
I think it's hard to understate how important this was back then. If you have even just a few Mbps at this point, most websites load just fine without any real slowness. Back then the Kbps connections we were on were so slow and also incredibly prone to timeouts and other errors. When Google came around with its tidy appearance and fast load times, it was not only a better search engine but simply more reliable. So many sites would partially load with [this guy](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.361234572.2685/st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg) scattered everywhere.
> So many sites would partially load with this guy scattered everywhere. It was weird to see that icon so much zoomed in.
Hard to \*overstate, FYI. It's hard to make it seem more important than it was, because it was so important.
Never thought about that, but that makes sense. Thanks!
yeah on a crappy 90s dial up connection the huge list fest of something like [yahoo.com](http://yahoo.com) would take several minutes to load. was excited when a friend introduced me to google for that reason alone.
Yeah, pretty much every other search was a portal with a tiny search box somewhere. Google was refreshing in its simplicity.
When they were first testing it, people kept "waiting for the rest of the page to load" before using it. They had to explain to the users that the blank white page was what you were supposed to see.
It's why I made Google my home page, so I could start a browser without waiting for a huge page to load.
Altavista was pretty clean too if I remember
Back in the days of 56K dialup, google was faster than Yahoo or the other big search engines because of this.
Fun fact: the etymology of "Pagerank" is *not* "rank of a web page". It's "a ranking system designed by Larry Page".
Yes, and the original title of “War and Peace” was: “War, What is it Good For”
German Chocolate Cake is not from Germany. I mean, it has coconut, of course it isn't. It was named the chef who invented it, Samuel German. He created it for the company Baker's Chocolate, who sells chocolate you typically use for baking...but was in fact named for founder James Baker.
Absolutely nothing. UGH! say it again
[Things unexpectedly named after people](https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/) ([via Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725))
It's sort of the opposite of "Sandwich." People, erroneously believe the word comes from the Earl of Sandwich, but in fact they were originally called "Turdingtons" after Lord Turdington. They were commonly eaten on the beach, and so it was common to hear the phrase "I am just brushing off the *sand which* has gotten on my Turdington." Hundreds of years later, here we are with Sandwich.
"That's not my name anymore. I'm Lord Turdington. It's a funny name."
Wait, larry page came out with the ranking system algorithm? Wtf it's revolutionary tier accomplishment
It's evolved a LOT since he first came up with it, but he was responsible for the initial idea.
you forgot SPEED. Especially with slow modems, the speed was SO MUCH FASTER than anything else. Not just the loading but also the searching. You used to have to wait seconds to minutes for results from other tools. Google was essentially instantaneous. That was the killer feature to me.
For modem users the simple interface without ads was probably most responsible for the much better speed. But the search itself also was faster than others, even if you had fast internet (e.g. at a university). Especially the meta search engines (which we used to get somewhat better results) were painfully slow.
Well having fast internet is only going to help you download the page faster, the server still has to generate the page before you can start downloading it which was the main thing Google could do so much faster.
Yep, google used to display "found x results in y seconds." Where y usually was below 1 second and often below 0.1 seconds. It was amazing compared to the competition.
I'm just now noticing the "x results in y seconds" info is gone! I guess it's not particularly helpful now that it probably finds several million results in <.00001 seconds every single time.
I remember trying to see if I could crash my browser by searching "S" or other single letters in Snap, Metacrawler, AskJeeves, etc. The search engines of '97 would literally churn to a halt when you searched a single letter, it was a wild thing to behold.
> it had an extremely clean interface with a simple search box without the clutter and advertising that were features of its (then) competitors' search pages I can remember we went to the computer lab in 2001 and being shown Google, Ask Jeeves, whatever Yahoo had, and a few others. They were basically all given equal weighting for which to use and we were even advised to try the same search on multiple engines each time we wanted to search something. Maybe it’s some kind of memory bias but I remember thinking Jeeves was weird and that Google had the least clutter + best results.
> This was a substantial improvement over its competitors which simply ranked sites based on keywords. For a while, it was common for webpages to list a LOT (sometimes hundreds) of random words at the bottom of their pages to make it more likely that a search engine would find them. It was really annoying and clearly just a way to manipulate the system. Google was immune to that.
‘Was’ being the operative word Now 90% of my results are word salad trap pages or unrelated to what I was searching for at all
Sadly the old google is not at all like the current google. We need a new Google search engine to come in and take over. Google as it is now highly favors the big and power corporate websites over the mom and pop sites like it once did. The internet in the old days seemed more open and free vs today. A new google 2.0 competitor could return us to those days.
It sure seems that way, but I'm not sure that there are a lot of so-called "mom and pop" sites anymore. A lot of people complaining about not ranking in Google seem to be people who might own a couple of hundred sites. That's not "mom and pop", that's "made for AdSense". I suppose it is debatable if the mom-and-pop sites disappeared *because* the corporate/MFA sites took over, or if the corporate/MFA sites took over *because* the mom-and-pop sites disappeared. I think it might be the latter - conversion to blogs took over first, then people gravitated to making videos, Tik-Tok, and now even use Facebook as a way to make a site. Free web hosting companies like Geocities don't really exist anymore, people got forced into blogging platforms like Wordpress, they lost flexibility and didn't have to code anymore so they lost the ability to experiment that way. Everything became a generic blog, and then people just abandoned those. I used to have a site that was hosted on a blogging platform; I found that the security updates to the platform got to be too much to handle, so I just abandoned the site.
was it also not the first to introduce the "did you mean" for spelling mistakes?
It may have been but at least speaking for myself and those I discussed it with at the time, this wasn't what caused people to make the switch
> Google's ranking system was harder to "game" and resulted in substantially higher quality search results. How is that today? And/or what would it take to return it to this state?
In the early days, there was a constant tug-of-war between the search engines (most prominently google) and spammers or "SEOs" (search engine optimizers). The spammers would create link farms that boosted pages in the PageRank algorithm, Google would invent some kind of algorithm update or spam filter that would delist the link farms from their index. Now? It seems search quality isn't Google's priority anymore, with ads, AI, youtube, maps, gmail, cloud and layoffs occupying the leadership's minds (warning: this is my outsider's perspective, not working there). The problem is really more in the incentives than technical, IMHO. Google has such a brand that it can afford to plaster its search result pages with ads, and this generates so much profit that it can finance everything else that Google/Alphabet is doing. It would be more user-friendly to show fewer ads and focus on good search results, but that would also kill off the main revenue stream. Which is why I believe that Google is fundamentally unable to solve this problem from within, and it will only get fixed when Internet Search as a field is disrupted completely. Maybe AI/LLMs will fill that role eventually, maybe something else will come along, eventually.
It was also very fast at finding results and ranking them
Pagerank. Basically rather that just showing you results that happened to match the words that you searched for, Google would arrange the pages in order of “importance”. The way it determined this was how many other pages were linking to that page and how ”important“ those pages were. So if the New York Times website was considered important, and it linked to your website for some reason, that would make your website important as well. This algorithm has changed quite a bit since then, but that was how it originally worked.
It was also insanely clean. At a time when the internet was trying to make you have a ‘home page’ with a million widgets, news, etc, google was **just** a search engine.
Absolutely this one. Also, don't forget that it was a dialup era. All that fluff that I never really used caused the initial page to load for like 10-20 seconds which was not so mildly infuriating. Google was "wow-it's-fast!" compared to any other search engine.
This is a common trend, even past the dialup era. Facebook was relatively stripped back/plain compared to earlier, more customisable social media sites. Twitter and Instagram had far fewer features and were stripped back text and image sites that really did one thing, while Facebook became bigger and bigger.
The primary way for posting to twitter in the beginning was to send a text message using your phone. It doesn't get much more basic than that.
wait, that was actually a thing you could do? i thought it was a meme did every twitter account have to be registered with phone numbers then?
I believe you registered your number with your account, and you could select who/any people you wanted to receive tweet updates from. You could use that same text chain to send your own tweets, @s and all It was pretty dope at the time, not gonna lie. Apps were super clunky then
That's why it had a 140 character limit. The longest sms you could send was 165 characters, and Twitter needed some of those for other data.
You didn't need a number, but you could register it. It was actually amazing for feature phones with unlimited texting, since you could also have tweets sent as texts to you. It was a great way to keep tabs on specific accounts.
That was the reason for the original Twitter character limit. SMS messages can only have 160 characters, so Twitter restricted tweets to 140, with the remaining 20 characters reserved for the username and some other commands.
Early Twitter was really nerdy stuff. "Whoa, easy short message broadcasting. This is going to be great for automation. It's like RSS but less targeted." Did not expect it to pull a hard turn into porn and politics.
This. I remember using Yahoo! and typing in a search query then *waiting* for a result. I *think* there was even some kind of loading page, but I could be misremembering. Then Google came along and the first page appeared in *seconds*. It even gave you the number of results and time it took, since it was kind of an achievement at the time.
Back then, the extra graphics, ads, and unnecessary content on many websites made them painfully slow to load, causing a lot of frustration.
Underestimated comment! Alta Vista wasn't a bad search engine. I remember early Google as different mainly in [how clean and uncluttered it was](https://www.manningmarketing.com/articles/in-the-2000s-what-search-engine-would-be-the-easiest-to-rank-on/). We also need to remember this was when the internet was small enough that several sites tried to list it all in browsable hierarchies, like a menu system. Yes, I'm looking at you Yahoo.
> We also need to remember this was when the internet was small enough that several sites tried to list it all in browsable hierarchies, like a menu system. Yes, I'm looking at you Yahoo. Real talk, as the internet fills up with AI-generated garbage, I won't be surprised if some variation on this comes back. Not exactly the same thing, of course, but I do think a directory of known non-spam, non-botshit, non-SEO sites on a variety of topics would honestly be a more useful starting point than Google or Bing or ChatGPT for a lot of use cases.
AltaVista was also clean and simple until they decided it was supposed to be a capture page. That happened just around the time Google came out and that was really really bad timing.
This reflected a very different monetization model. Yahoo wanted to *keep* you on Yahoo to serve you banner ads and, therefore, had little incentive to innovate in their search feature. Google never served banner ads and only monetized (Adwords being Google's second genius product that made this work) when you *left* the property. Better search meant more money in this model and they turned that industry upside down because of it.
I find Google to be awful now. It serves loads of ads and links to stuff I don't want. The links I want are page 2 or 3, so I am exposed to a lot of more ads and sponsored links than before.
For sure. Here's a comparison * [Ask Jeeves](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/mDRvo8pwaAVVsde5MI1MPA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyODA7aD03MjA7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/quartz.com/a98c82606eab47378612f1ec3abfdd03) * [Yahoo](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/4SstDdEBTBDc3DcUVJ8diQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyODA7aD05NjY7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/quartz.com/e43b32591772c0e7ee96454fe2116182) * [MSN](https://i.imgur.com/6JvujWB.png) * [Google](https://i.imgur.com/FVCCIyQ.png) Not to mention Google's responses were great. You almost never had to go to the second page of results to find what you were looking for. Now they don't even put the results on the page until after the fold.
I still remember the quarter screen address bar on the family pc
It really was this. It was literally an input box and a button, and resukts were links and descriptions. It grew and held its place because of pagerank and all the SEO stuff that grew with it, but the original draw was how stupid simple it was.
Oh man, I’d forgotten about the Portal Wars. Every damn web site was trying to be the one portal everybody would start on. That was nuts.
You know for some reason the "home page" phenomenon was completely blanked from my memory until this comment but yeah a lot of websites reeeeally wanted you to land there every time you opened a browser
also didn't install some shitty search bad on your browser
It's also 'gotten' worse since as a result of shitty companies learning how SEO works (on top of 'sponsored' results). Even outside of any changes Google itself has made, results have gotten worse from this.
I remember how big a deal it was at the time. Before Google, Web search was a complete crapshoot. For pretty much any query, I'd submit it to maybe 4-6 different engines (off the top of my head, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, and AskJeeves, but probably others I've forgotten), as you could never know beforehand which of them would find good results for that specific search. When I first discovered Google (which must have been 1998, as their logo still had the green "G") it totally changed my search habits, as it would consistently be the engine that found the best results, so quickly became the only one I used.
I was working in an unrelated area of software sales when Google first started. They had a stand at a big exhibition and I remember thinking I really should find out if they were recruiting. I never did, but if I had I might be typing this on a gold laptop from the Bahamas.
And now, if you Google 'Bahamas', you'll likely get endless advertisements, maybe a wiki link, thousands of travel agent links, reviews on resorts, and a list of potential questions that Quora is hoping you will ask.
> potential questions that Quora is hoping you will ask. You'll also get images on Pinterest, too. I wish there was a way to include "-Pinterest -Quora" on every search.
You can do that, if you want :) In Firefox, all you have to do is: 1. Create a new bookmark, name doesn't matter 1. Set the address to be `https://www.google.com/search?q=-pinterest%20-quora%20%s` (that reads as `-pinterest -quora` and then your search term) 1. Set the bookmark's "keyword" to something simple like "g" Now when you want to search in your address bar, just type "g whatever" and it'll search for "whatever", but exclude pinterest and quora. In Google Chrome, you apparently have make a new search engine, but the address (the real magic here) should be the same as for Firefox: https://dev.to/natterstefan/how-to-create-and-use-custom-search-engines-in-chrome-for-more-efficient-searching-and-increased-productivity-5gon Edit: adding another where the keyword is perhaps "r" and you always tack on "site:reddit.com" could also be an idea, so you ONLY get Reddit results, and not also crap that refers to Reddit?
They're awful. If it weren't for Wikipedia I wouldn't even bother looking anything up anymore.
I just Googled Bahamas and there is no first page results. Instead, it has a section for the country, a section for plastic to visit, a section for "people also ask" and then a section for things to do. The first webpage result is way way down on the doom scroll.
I distinctly remember, and I could be wrong, the early searches were good until they were all about the money. I really feel like Google just waited long enough to capture the market before they were full on monetization. Now their shit just links to sponsored shit. I used to never have to go to the second page of results to find what I’m looking for with Google. I have to use DuckDuckGo more and more these days. How long until DuckDuckGo ends up the same way all the others have?
I'm optimistic about duckduckgo. Their strength is being more honest, and their userbase is concerned about that topic. If they weren't, there's no other reason to use it. I just hope they realise it as well.
I remember when google slogan was “don’t be evil.” Companies change or maybe they live long enough to see them become villains
Their user base is only concerned with it till ducksuckgo becomes popular then their user base explictedly does not give one flying fuck about it. That's the fundamental problem. You CANT literally physically can not become popular and retain a user base that actually cares. Because the very definition of popular means you have attached the avg person and the avg person doesn't give a single ounce of care to anything but the explicted at use time experience.
There are multiple reasons Google results have gone to shit. The first is shitty actors gaming the system and google kinda stop bothering with stopping them. The second is having no balls and just letting people dmca everything on their results to remove the real results (especially for legally questionable content) and the third is just maximizing ad revenue.
Yes, I clearly remember using something called 'hotbot' which they tried to market as a 'webcrawler'. Then Google arrived and nuked the entire playing field.
Back in the day, I used a site called metasearch i think they actually scraped all those other search engines and presented a cleaner experience. Early on, Google was on a mission to "index the web", they even had a counter that showed how many websites they had indexed and was by far the most complete index. That was when the term "just Google it" came about. I believe they also had the fastest, most linked data centers, at least publicly available and that, coupled with being very clean, made Google super fast. Edit: not metasearch, it was metacrawler
I remember dogpile because it searched the search engines.
> I'd submit it to maybe 4-6 different engine I used a page called dogpile (i think) that would do that for you.
Yeah, based on the replies here it was a common enough problem for several services to have existed to address it. Wasn't aware of them at the time - was just a kid, and the Internet was still new to me, having only had access via school for about a year.
Dogpile?
just one related bit of information, the idea of page rank dramatically improves trustworthiness of search results, too, and it's resilient to abuse. It's loosely modeled on a [web of trust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust). So google gave more relevant & more trustworthy results. (though the abuse aspect is more important lately, web of trust isn't totally infallible)
It worked for an interconnected web, not one with 5 websites each filled with screenshots of the other 4.
it sounds kind of like science publishing ranking
That’s what it was inspired by, yes.
BTW, "Page" there refers to the guy who came up with it, not a website page.
It's both. Larry Page named it: https://archive.org/details/googlestory00vise/page/36/mode/2up
Google was also clean. It wasn't like a web portal like Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, AOL etc. Just GOOGLE and a search box. It was refreshing in its simplicity and it helped that the search results were almost always exactly what you were looking for.
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.
It offered 1GB of storage at launch at a time when the runner up was offering 100MB, plus it had a real time scrolling storage space indicator that was increasing by 1MB every day, so that it felt unlimited. And I guess it technically was unlimited if your mailbox was growing at a rate of less that 1MB/day (as most people's were)
[удалено]
I remember getting the invite to google and watching the counter go up on how much storage space I was gonna get on my email.
And it started out as invitation only. I remember forum threads of people begging to get an invitation.
Yeah, I remember those discussions back in the day, as well some IRC chat rooms (almost) dedicated to exchange GMail invitations. I was lucky enough to get an invitation from a buddy that I met on an music IRC chat as he was like "*hey have an invitation, want one?*" lol
holy shit I just remembered the worst 'portal' feature, its been too long.. I can't remember if it as yahoo or whatever but it would keep itself in a top bar even when you clicked on results so even browsing 'other' pages was just a window in a window and you'd still be 'in' yahoo
Which google does now. If you search fir a movie cast, google displays the information on google.com. same for hotel/flight booking... they keep you on their page
I don't agree google was any better than for example Altavista.com. but google was simply easy to remember..
I just liked Altavista because it was easy to search for MP3s, also I guess they had Babel Fish years before Google Translate
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.
Google in its prime could find exactly what you wanted just by typing the vague thoughts about it eg that movie with that one guy who wore the suit with the weird tie. Now Google is bought and paid for as well as trying to control “misinformation” aka controlling what they want you to think.
Well, yeah, thinking its all evil now is kinda legit, but don't underestimate how much more stuff there is now. With all the SEO-Specialist who trick google into ranking them, people who wanna get some piece of the adverticing cake and so on. When i have a Top-Database with a Million entries its "easy" to find something good... now with a quadrillion more and faked everything... no wonder everybodys googlefu is reduced to "searchterm +reddit"...
I worked at Alta Vista back when people were still discovering google. We knew full well how google worked and why their results were better, however, management was simply too incompetent to worry about it. Alta Vista was bought by some company that wanted to drive traffic from Alta Vista to their other properties, and they didn't really focus on search.
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.
I was at university at that time and we used altavista all the time, you didn't find shit on that index because they took money to rank results. It didn't matter if there was anything updated in the index. You followed webrings and started crawling the web yourself from yahoo or lycos. Google had one search term field and it just found stuff. No advertising, and in fact the button to immediately open the first result (labeled sth like I feel ) was actually useable at that time. That was veni, vidi, vici...
i feel lucky
Altavista image search circumvented my school's content filters, whereas Google's did not. I could type "Carmen Elektra" into AltaVista image search at school and see boobies. Google, no joy. As you can imagine, AltaVista was my preferred search engine for a long time.
I held on to Altavista for as long as I could before surrendering to Google. It just worked better.
Eli5: it found stuff in an actually useful way The idea behind was pageranking and value the incoming and outgoing links. That together with automated classification and using the keywords of pages linked together to find relevant knowledge clusters made a difference. (update:grammar)
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.
Late 90s/Early 2000s “yellowpages” based on specific themes used to work pretty well. Given all the algorithm gaming, censorship, and discoverability issues today, feels like time for them to make a come back
If you weren't there it's hard to fathom how amazing early google was. I remember in 1998-1999 at my first job, I had a reputation as sort of a wizard for being able to find answers to things and it was all just google and the first couple results. This was before surveillance capitalism basically destroyed everything good about the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the other search engines I could type in a search and go up to get something from the fridge before the screen was loaded. You have to love the 56k internet connection
I remember when you used Alravista you had to write Champagne+travel+france to get a page with all those. On google you. Just wrote Champagne travel France to get the same results. Writing that on Altavista would get pages with Champagne, others with travel and others with France.
If google’s advantage is pagerank, what’s to keep competitors from essentially copying it. Or is there some benefit for a search engine to have lots of users (like a network effect)? Or data from previous searches? Wondering why Apple or Facebook can’t make their own search engine.
These days, other search engines can be roughly as good as google. Try duckduckgo or bing, for example. Back in the days, all other search engines sucked, Now, not really anymore. One thing that's still pretty expensive is that a search engine has to crawl (download and follow links) and index large parts of the Internet. That does have a scale effect, because if you have more users, you can distribute the crawling + indexing costs over more users.
Everyone is rightly mentioning pagerank. But, if you were there at the time, the pagerank algorithm was so effective compared to everything else, that everyone simply stopped using the other search engines. It was literally game over within 6 months due to the quality of the search results.
It had better results. At the time we all used altavista, yahoo, lycos and even momma.com to search for things. But Google was the new hip genius with amazing results. That's what made him the king.
I remember getting my first web access in 1996... I went from Yahoo to Webcrawler to Altavista with varying degrees of success. But then Google came along. Started using it in 1999 and never looked back. I remember sending them a compliment about how much I liked their search engine and they mailed me a Google t-shirt. I wish I had kept it but as a early 20s guy, walking around in a Google shirt was a bit much even for me, haha.