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> What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeb

> What's more, Google was never in the business of "being a solid search engine". Google is and always has been in the business of selling access to users' eyeballs. That's not how they became the darling of the tech scene though. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users [..] we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. [..] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

liberte82 7y ago
When Google was first released it was revolutionary. I remember just being amazed at the quality of the search results compared to any other engines. And amazingly, the competitors still haven't caught up, for all of Google's issues.
- lunchables 7y ago
  So true, the difference was monumental. Pagerank was a huge breakthrough that seems so simple and so obvious in hindsight, it's clear why it changed everything. The popularity of a website shouldn't be based on the number of times they can stuff keywords into a page, it should be based on the number of human beings who used the site and determined it was valuable enough to link to. I don't know if pagerank is used anymore, but at the time, with the state of the web then, it was an incredible breakthrough.
  - liberte82 7y ago
    Yep, prior to Google the dominant SEO strategy was to spam keywords into hidden HTML tags invisible to readers.

liberte82 7y ago

When Google was first released it was revolutionary. I remember just being amazed at the quality of the search results compared to any other engines. And amazingly, the competitors still haven't caught up, for all of Google's issues.

lunchables 7y ago
So true, the difference was monumental. Pagerank was a huge breakthrough that seems so simple and so obvious in hindsight, it's clear why it changed everything. The popularity of a website shouldn't be based on the number of times they can stuff keywords into a page, it should be based on the number of human beings who used the site and determined it was valuable enough to link to. I don't know if pagerank is used anymore, but at the time, with the state of the web then, it was an incredible breakthrough.
- liberte82 7y ago
  Yep, prior to Google the dominant SEO strategy was to spam keywords into hidden HTML tags invisible to readers.