What made Google...Google?

[Affiliate X]

I would be interested to see what everybody thinks is the reason for Google taking over the search engine game. I don't mean the endless amounts of leverage and power they have today, but what was it that allowed them to take over with such dominance?

Although I am ignorant to the year(s) when Google began their takeover into the mainstream, I have been using the internet since it's inception and others like Yahoo, Altavista, Webcrawler etc. were always the choices for searching, but there was never one single "go-to" search engine like Google is today. Yahoo seemed the most dominant if I remember correctly, but there were many other players at that time as well.

What move(s) did Google make at that particular time to begin dominating in such an aggressive fashion? Was their search engine liked by more searchers? Providing more accurate results to searchers? Better indexing and more benefits for webmasters? A more corporate, behind the scenes move?

What started the massive landslide of dominance that is Google?

 

[procam]

Adwords & Investors and one hell of an development team.

 

[BassTrackerBoats]

They called me and I set them up.

Too bad I didn't get stock options.

 

[Moneypulation]

Well, quite easy:

The search engines you mentioned from the "pre-google-era" weren't realy search engines but web catalogs. That means: website owners were able to register their websites on those "search engines" and chose their keywords for which they wanted to be found.

But Google used a different strategy: they built so called "crawlers" which are programs that search through the internet and index those pages by looking at the keywords on the pages. The crawling process is quite easy: those "bots" went to a website, indexed them and followed every link on the website in order to find new websites. Then they crawled those websites and so on.

That was completely new and made Google the most popular search engine because they have been the first "real" search engine which really allows you to search through the web, not only through listed websites.

 

[phpbuilt]

I don't remember when it happened (very, very long time ago) but my favorite search engine was altavista.com. Then one day they I did a search and put some lots of ads in their search results, and I said screw this ... went looking for an alternative and found Google. It was plain, simple, no ads.

Now I get pissed off using Google with all the crap they inject into the results, every day it seems they have a new way of altering things so that naturally high ranking pages get less exposure. But I keep using Google because it's results are the only ones that matter.

 

[dewaz]

I agree, google provide the best result for searcher, it will saves a lot of time searching.

but I hate their domination, not they totally rules the internet. monopoly will always the worst.

 

[bertbaby]

Search engine algorithm and their bots removed the need for human review of sites. Add the rule of Power Numbers and they took off to become Googliath.

 

[Moneypulation]

Oh, btw: if you are sick of google try DuckDuckGo
It is a great project!

 

[The Doctor]

pagerank algorithm

 

[larrydetuvi]

Why Google keeps at the top? Well, because of two reason mainly. The first one is that people has the "Google" brand tatoo'd in their brains, they are used to search anything in Google and get mostly what they need. The second reason is because it's truly a good search engine, compare Google results with other search engines and you will see in average that Google results are better. This without counting that they spend a good amount of money in marketing.

 

[silentthunder]

Remember Metacrawler and all the mega-meta search engines like "Momma" ("Momma
knows best."). Somehow I feel we got gypped by what's become the Walmart of
Search Engines.

 

[kokoloko75]

I don't remember when it happened (very, very long time ago) but my favorite search engine was altavista.com. Then one day they I did a search and put some lots of ads in their search results, and I said screw this ... went looking for an alternative and found Google. It was plain, simple, no ads.

Now I get pissed off using Google with all the crap they inject into the results, every day it seems they have a new way of altering things so that naturally high ranking pages get less exposure. But I keep using Google because it's results are the only ones that matter.

I used Copernic...

Beny

 

[ninjacrx]

Simplicity

 

[Affiliate X]

Why Google keeps at the top? Well, because of two reason mainly. The first one is that people has the "Google" brand tatoo'd in their brains, they are used to search anything in Google and get mostly what they need. The second reason is because it's truly a good search engine, compare Google results with other search engines and you will see in average that Google results are better. This without counting that they spend a good amount of money in marketing.

You missed the point of my topic. Everybody knows that Google remains dominant because they have placed themselves in a position of endless leverage and branding. The question was, what did they do at the time when they first began their takeover that worked so much better than the several other players in the field.

But as I suspected, the introduction of bots and a science for indexing sites automatically seems to be the answer.

 

[Affiliate X]

Adwords & Investors and one hell of an development team.

I may be wrong, but I believe Adwords was added to their arsenal after they gained their dominance. At least to some degree.

 

[istart]

I think it was their interface. They had a logo a field to type and 2 buttons and nothing else but white screen. No load time for those of us with 24 & 56k modems which made it a good home pave for your browser. I thinks that's how they first became a big player. That and relevant search results.

Ad words definitely came later.

 

[thizzladen]

This reminds me of my pre-pubescent days of using Lycos' image search for porn xD

On-topic... I'm pretty sure it was the bots and spiders that BTB developed for them that acctually put them IN THE GAME.

 

[BassTrackerBoats]

I was actually a dogpile guy until I started to see how much traffic Google sent my way.

Sorry dogpile, $ Trumps a cool search engine name.

 

[Lutherblissett]

Google became dominant because they used linking as a method of relevance. . .this was a major breakthrough in the importance of websites and other search engines were just directory listings, with no gauge of what was good and what wasnt. ..

Im not 100% (my memory is cloudy on this) . . but i think these docos highlight some of the rise of google in the second installation calle search
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/download-true-story-internet/

 

[awtprod]

I may be wrong, but I believe Adwords was added to their arsenal after they gained their dominance. At least to some degree.

It was but it was revolutionary when it came out.