> But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth. I do love the story of algorithm wins, but is the

> But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth. I do love the story of algorithm wins, but is there any evidence at all showing how important PageRank was/is, either way? I think it is hard to be sure exactly why something is popular, even when it's happening, so I suspect there isn't much evidence either way. There's two parts to the issue: (1) did PageRank give "better" results, for what users wanted? (2) was this an active factor in their preference for google? I've heard the argument that the speed of results is a very significant factor (as the article claims), and that was definitely a factor for me. Also, I recall research from google showing the dramatic effect on user satisfaction from even slight differences in latency (above a perceived-as-instantaneous threshold). Another factor at the time was that google didn't have paid ranking, so search results were better in this sense - related to this is a psychological trust issue, which would make people feel more comfortable with google, even if the improvement in search results was insignificant. You didn't have suspect the results. Possibly the crucial factor (at that time) was that everyone else had crowded homepages; whereas google was simple and sparse and just did search. Both the last two have been eroded, as the competition copied google. One would think they could also catch up on latency - it's certainly easier for any search engine that processes fewer queries. Google retains the advantage of familiarity, which surprisingly is one of the strongest competitive advantages for consumer goods, where the technology doesn't change much (eg. gum and cola). So... provided google keeps up with the competition technically, it will trounce them commercially.