alt Hacker NewsThey absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time.
No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
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I used Dogpile "because it searches all of them at once!" until I realized that only Google's results were worth anything.
Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much.
I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.
I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.
Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.
This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
Agreed. They won by having the best product. And it wasn't even close.