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The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the sea

by onli 9y ago

The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads, I think it won because the search results were so much better. There might be some indirect connection - less revenue because of a different advertising model, leading to less investment - but I rather think this was just about the technology not being there. Which is maybe not that surprising when coming from curated links and suddenly fighting, well, Google.

cpeterso 9y ago
IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.
- sixothree 9y ago
  To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.
  - Retra 9y ago
    And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.
- dpark 9y ago
  Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.
  - eli 9y ago
    It was also ludicrously fast at returning results compared to everyone else at the time. I was shocked at the time that a dynamically generated page could return so quickly. I still to this day miss Altavista's advanced operators though
    - bigger_cheese 9y ago
      Yes google was so much better than all those other sites it was like night and day. I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slogging through pages of useless results trying to find what you were looking for. I was in 8th or 9th grade we were given an assignment to write a report about the "G8 forum" none of the search engines I used at the time were capable of returning meaningful results for all the possible combinations of "G8", "G+8", "G and 8", "Group of 8", "G AND 8 AND Summit OR Forum" I could think of. I'd just get pages and pages of nonsense compounded by the fact my school's dial up was so slow - a 33 kb modem I think it was an exercise in frustration. I complained to my parents about it over dinner and my Dad said 'oh you should try google.com' First time I'd ever heard about google, the next day at school I tried a google search and got meaningful results on the very first page. I don't think I ever used Yahoo or any of those other sites again after that.
      - dpark 9y ago
        That was pretty much my experience as well, though I was in college. Someone pointed me at Google when I was struggling to find something and it was just clearly so much better that I basically just never used Yahoo again.
      - johnvanommen 9y ago
        Google built a better mousetrap. This is a nice article, but the truth is that Yahoo is to Google as Myspace is to Facebook.
dpark 9y ago
> The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads Extremely strange. Google won because search was better. Users flocked there because it actually worked. The fact that it had integrated ads was incidental. Integrated ads helped with funding obviously, but users don't care about that. (To the extent that they do, they actively don't want it.)
- danaliv 9y ago
  This is my recollection as well. Google was amazing because the results were so astonishingly better than anything else before it. As for ads, I don't recall Google even having ads at all to begin with. And when they did start including advertising, everyone was already getting annoyed with web ads, and Google had somehow found a way to do ads "right." (Unrelated: I would just like to say that the subheading "Portal Combat" is worth the salary of whoever wrote it.)

by onli 9y ago

cpeterso 9y ago

IIRC, Google was one of the first search engines to AND your search terms by default, returning relevant pages from long tail sites. Other search engines at the time would OR your search terms, returning irrelevant pages from popular sites. I think this simple difference in defaults had almost as big an impact as Google's PageRank/BackRub algorithm.

sixothree 9y ago
To get an idea of where the search experience was when google came to market - they were the first ones to have the text cursor located in the search box. You didn't have to click the box before you started typing, your cursor was automatically placed in the correct place.
- Retra 9y ago
  And most other search engines put ads on the main search page. Google just gave you a box. This was a big deal when you're on those old, slow connections. It was also less obtrusive and more classy.
dpark 9y ago
Every search engine of Yahoo's era supported ANDing terms. It didn't help. The result you wanted was still swimming beneath 7 pages of trash. Commonly it wasn't even in the results because the AND was too restrictive. Backrub is what made Google so much better. Google also really focused on search and made numerous improvements, but the linchpin was backrub.
- eli 9y ago
  It was also ludicrously fast at returning results compared to everyone else at the time. I was shocked at the time that a dynamically generated page could return so quickly. I still to this day miss Altavista's advanced operators though
  - bigger_cheese 9y ago
    Yes google was so much better than all those other sites it was like night and day. I was in high school at the time in the 90's. Where I lived the internet wasn't very widespread only place I could access it was via dial up in our school library I remember trying to do school projects having to go through the search engine dance you'd start by searching yahoo, then infoseek, then lycos, then altavista one by one slogging through pages of useless results trying to find what you were looking for. I was in 8th or 9th grade we were given an assignment to write a report about the "G8 forum" none of the search engines I used at the time were capable of returning meaningful results for all the possible combinations of "G8", "G+8", "G and 8", "Group of 8", "G AND 8 AND Summit OR Forum" I could think of. I'd just get pages and pages of nonsense compounded by the fact my school's dial up was so slow - a 33 kb modem I think it was an exercise in frustration. I complained to my parents about it over dinner and my Dad said 'oh you should try google.com' First time I'd ever heard about google, the next day at school I tried a google search and got meaningful results on the very first page. I don't think I ever used Yahoo or any of those other sites again after that.
    - dpark 9y ago
      That was pretty much my experience as well, though I was in college. Someone pointed me at Google when I was struggling to find something and it was just clearly so much better that I basically just never used Yahoo again.
    - johnvanommen 9y ago
      Google built a better mousetrap. This is a nice article, but the truth is that Yahoo is to Google as Myspace is to Facebook.

dpark 9y ago

> The Google search comparisons in the article are strange. Google did not win the search engine war because it had integrated ads Extremely strange. Google won because search was better. Users flocked there because it actually worked. The fact that it had integrated ads was incidental. Integrated ads helped with funding obviously, but users don't care about that. (To the extent that they do, they actively don't want it.)

danaliv 9y ago
This is my recollection as well. Google was amazing because the results were so astonishingly better than anything else before it. As for ads, I don't recall Google even having ads at all to begin with. And when they did start including advertising, everyone was already getting annoyed with web ads, and Google had somehow found a way to do ads "right." (Unrelated: I would just like to say that the subheading "Portal Combat" is worth the salary of whoever wrote it.)