What made Google...Google?

It was definitely the quality of the search results for me. I used to use all kinds of different search engines like MetaCrawler, Lycos and all the rest, but that's exactly the point. There was never a really good search engine that was the "go-to" ONE.

If you were looking for say, a CGI script for managing a top-100 sites list... You couldn't really go to any of the "search engines" to find this. You had to do a broad search and narrow your results down, for example.. Search for "CGI scripts" then go to those results. You'd end up at places like HotScripts.com and narrow THAT site down to the top-100 list scripts.

Then Google came along and you could just type that junk in, it'd most likely take you to the best top 100 script's home page or directly to a specialty site's directory for those scripts. Everything was easier with Google, much more direct to exactly what you're looking for and less time searching.

That really made them the first good search engine, because if you think about it.. Others came long before Google. Yahoo!, AOL, MSN were top players long before Google. They weren't search engines, though.. They wanted you to do everything on their website, here's your e-mail, here's your news, here's this and that and everything else.

Google was the first one to focus on the quality of their SEARCH RESULTS (and be very good at it.) You went there to search, nothing else. Gmail, News, AdWords, all that stuff came way later and they did very well at maintaining their status as a search engine that happens to have other services and not a service site that happens to have a web search.

(1)All Google was a blank white screen, 1 logo & 2 buttons = fantastic for a 56k modem. I believe responsiveness mattered ALOT then. Afterall, we did pay for internet useage by the minute (lol).

Yahoo! Lycos etc were all portals like meatro said. Slow. Distracting.

+

(2)Increasingly more reliable search results.

Man this brings me back to my youth. Love talking about stuff like this. I think point (1) is more important than is given credit for. Back then speed was everything to the average joe on his dial up modem.

Affiliate X said:

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?

Click to expand...

Focus strategy - pure play search. Also they got buy in from webmasters, and the results were pretty good. The others were all a mix like mass marketing and portals, Google's then 'corporate' culture was cool and nerdy, now it's just kind of evil in it's pursuit of more or less everything with a fucking microchip in it. However now Google seems to shifting from it's core search strategy into everything from cryogenically frozen eggs to automated bed wetting alarms for people with bowel problems, and will probably turn into a steaming pile of shit in the next 5-10 years.

FuManChu said:

pagerank algorithm

Click to expand...

Yup this is what did it. When Google started all the other search engines just looked at the amount and significance of the keywords on the page (On-Site SEO).

Google took over because it started involving backlinks and pagerank (Offsite SEO), which proved to return better results.

there was a open market. yahoo was leading and was neither real trendy or real good. they where yuppis trying to make money with yahoo finance and focused on the wrong things.
g had a good easy name ... compare to altavista ....
g had a simple nice design ... i remember the others where having so much stuff on there pages and just somewhere a insert field where you can put your search in. google focused on that what the page is for and did not try to sell you weather or stock excange or other stuff what the others did.
g had good results

i dont think it was only the better search result. the main computer user never heared about PR until now.
it was simple and worked good compared to the others.....

they did nothing to seperate themselves from users.

at the time there were like a million other search engines. i used metacrawler like a noob, my brother used dogpile, my mom used yahoo, and my dad used netscape type stuff

then my brother started using google, and when i saw it it didn't do anything that made me feel like it was not for ME. like it was very plain and just displayed results. it wasn't made for a certain demographic like the other were trying. it just was a search engine that had good results. i think that is why everyone started to use it, because the other search engines were too flashy and had too much going on.

google focused on search and people wanted it for search. if they wanted news, or email or games and shit they could go to their favorite places that already provided it.

i think it was a combination of the focus on good search results and also NOT branding themselves in a way that excluded anyone. in other words everyone felt ok switching over and using it.

its like youtube, their branding wasn't too male or too female, or too techie or too environmental or too anything. its was very simple and just did what it set out to do without trying to cater to a demographic.


NOW google is starting to suck a little. THE SEARCH IS ALWAYS LAGGING! i have to type my search in my browser, not even on their own fucking page because its locked up because their damn instant results thing where it loads the SERPs before u press enter.. I disabled it, but I dont know why it randomly does it from time to time

istart said:

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.

Click to expand...

This.

It was easy, simple and fast. It delivered the results you wanted without the "Everything-in-one-screen" Yahoo, and didn't overcharge like AOL.

I still remember the day I switched, and it was 100% because of how fast the results came when compared to Yahoo.

lol @ people saying stuff like adwords.
No sorry, because you are young or haven't been online for a long time, Google has been around a little longer than that.

i remember when i was in college and doing some research on the net (circa 1998), i used yahoo, altavista and cari -which is localised in malaysia only. Then i found google. The algorithm they used in their search engine was so good that the answers they return do not go off topic, very unlike any other search engine. and via word of mouth, everybody started using google. the other search engines were too slow in improving their main product - which is search results. thats the keyword. google focused on the search results, and the others dont; even though they claim they were search engines.

nonetheless, the slow response time was because of the skeptism the other search engine had with google way of making money. during the first few years, when google is still privately owned, they did not focus so much on making money; right up until the first president (cant remember his name; but he was not Sergey or Larry) was appointed by the pressure from the angel investors google had those early days that they start focusing on the adwords etc.

btw, it was told very specifically in the book - the google story (or something like that).

No but seriously, the guy that said you had to put websites manually to search engines is wrong. The difference was google was using the 'quotation' method ( backlinking ) of ranking pages while others were using only metatags as reference.

If you think about it as in the real world, the more you talk about a person, the more popular and important it becomes.

Although I got a good laugh from this, I think you are right and wrong at the same time. I certainly agree that they did it right focusing only on searching without harassing users with varying amounts of shit. However, now that they have gained such dominance, the only smart thing for them to do is to keep growing.

The goal of any business is to attain a level of success within a specific market where they can then use that leverage to break into other markets and increase their power and solidify their position. So I agree with the first part, but I don't think their attempts at taking over other markets will lead to their downfall. I think the opposite actually. As much as many of us hate the monopoly they have, it is smart for them to continue to grow in every way possible to maintain their success.

googlemonster said:

Focus strategy - pure play search. Also they got buy in from webmasters, and the results were pretty good. The others were all a mix like mass marketing and portals, Google's then 'corporate' culture was cool and nerdy, now it's just kind of evil in it's pursuit of more or less everything with a fucking microchip in it. However now Google seems to shifting from it's core search strategy into everything from cryogenically frozen eggs to automated bed wetting alarms for people with bowel problems, and will probably turn into a steaming pile of shit in the next 5-10 years.

Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly

jon_xx_x said:

lol @ people saying stuff like adwords.
No sorry, because you are young or haven't been online for a long time, Google has been around a little longer than that.

Click to expand...

Not sure what you were saying here, but if you are implying that Google wasn't dominant until Adsense came along, you need to educate yourself.

Donkey Kong said:

No, they're not that great before 2004 and thing so call "adsense" appear

Click to expand...

beautiful minds

It was simple and at the time there was NOTHING else that returned relevant results like google did

1) Single-minded focus on delivering relevent search results.
2) Keeping their GUI clear of obnoxious, annoying and distracting clutter.

make it simple
is the secret of google

I think what made Google good is covered in this post. But just as interesting: what can make Google loose the position? The simple answer: machine reading. Yandex use it and it will over time give the best SERP.

They ripped meta information of the WWW without asking. Created competition among site owners. Site owners started using adwords. And the cycle repeats itself creating user experience.
Posted via Mobile Device