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it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. Right, I forgot people actually believe that. Um, they were a little better, maybe noticeably so by one

it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. Right, I forgot people actually believe that. Um, they were a little better, maybe noticeably so by one out of a thousand people. But wow, that's not why people switch search engines in droves. The real reason, aside from their gift for self-promotion (I first heard about them in a science glossy, which was rare for a web 'company'), is that they had a cute, zany name, and didn't do the three things I mentioned. Google was far more popular because of its spartan design, than its quality, regardless of how people mythologize the company now.

hypertele-Xii 6y ago
Yeah, the thing that set Google apart was that its web page had only: the logo, the search field, and the go button. It was clean. It was lean.
- guytv 6y ago
  ... they also had the "I'm feeling lucky" button which took you the the first search result. Hinting it was intelligent, but still not fully so.
colanderman 6y ago
Agreed. The first search I made on Google (~1999?), probably for something tech-related, turned up several porn results on the first page. Back to AltaVista, DMOZ, and webrings for at least another year…
avian 6y ago
Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods. That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.
disconcision 6y ago
do you have evidence to support this position? they certainly weren't the only search engine with a cute, zany name. trying to recall exactly why i switched. i don't entirely recall, but i remember that at the time i used a rotation of multiple engines, usually starting with metacrawler and then branching to other engines that didn't index. after switching to google, that rotation immediately ended. my recollection is that results really were that much better. i certainly appreciated google's design minimalism, but it certainly wasn't make-or-break, seeing as i was willing to go through multiple sites on every search. i wouldn't have cared about what you termed 'tricking the user', which feels like a skewed characterization. i just interpreted such things as 'no results', the same way i do now. that said, i can't really support my position either. i'm curious if anyone has tried to measure the quality of search over time.. you always see a lot of opinions about it here and elsewhere but it seems very much non-obvious to me, and hugely multivariate.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Unfortunately for my argument, my claim isn't founded on much beyond my gut feelings at the time. It would be easier to find articles that invalidate it. Certainly the ancient magazine article I mentioned (was it Discover? SciAm?) was a breathless story about boy genius graduate students and their breath-through page rank algorithm etc. The people around me (maybe bloggers, too?) seemed as, or more, interested in Google's simple 'noncommercial' design and use of the word 'googol', than in the accuracy of Google's results. On the plus side for my take, there's likely evidence that search users didn't consciously value search algorithms like they do now. In the 90s, people were mostly after 'total number of pages indexed'
vidarh 6y ago
Notably, at a the time, a lot of those of us who were "power users" tended to stick with Altavista longer in many cases because Google was at first not so much better that they could compete with highly precise use of Altavista's search operators. Google was much more noticeably better for non-technical who didn't know how to improve their results and didn't care to learn, but at the time that didn't translate to a massive numerical advantage in terms of users.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Yep, I also stuck with AltaVista for a couple years (or maybe Fast? Long time ago) because the I didn't find Google's results significantly better. I don't think it was the operators. In the late 00's Google's operators were the +traditional +plus +to +and +terms. They didn't introduce them immediately? Boy I was pissed when Google extracted that into 'verbatim mode'
mda 6y ago
No, it was better because it was much faster and results were much better. I remember those days, we (me, friends and family) were all using Altavista or lycos before, do you think we all switched to Google in a blink just because of it's spartan design?

hypertele-Xii 6y ago

Yeah, the thing that set Google apart was that its web page had only: the logo, the search field, and the go button. It was clean. It was lean.

guytv 6y ago
... they also had the "I'm feeling lucky" button which took you the the first search result. Hinting it was intelligent, but still not fully so.

colanderman 6y ago

Agreed. The first search I made on Google (~1999?), probably for something tech-related, turned up several porn results on the first page. Back to AltaVista, DMOZ, and webrings for at least another year…

avian 6y ago

Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods. That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.

disconcision 6y ago

do you have evidence to support this position? they certainly weren't the only search engine with a cute, zany name. trying to recall exactly why i switched. i don't entirely recall, but i remember that at the time i used a rotation of multiple engines, usually starting with metacrawler and then branching to other engines that didn't index. after switching to google, that rotation immediately ended. my recollection is that results really were that much better. i certainly appreciated google's design minimalism, but it certainly wasn't make-or-break, seeing as i was willing to go through multiple sites on every search. i wouldn't have cared about what you termed 'tricking the user', which feels like a skewed characterization. i just interpreted such things as 'no results', the same way i do now. that said, i can't really support my position either. i'm curious if anyone has tried to measure the quality of search over time.. you always see a lot of opinions about it here and elsewhere but it seems very much non-obvious to me, and hugely multivariate.

uniqueid 6y ago
Unfortunately for my argument, my claim isn't founded on much beyond my gut feelings at the time. It would be easier to find articles that invalidate it. Certainly the ancient magazine article I mentioned (was it Discover? SciAm?) was a breathless story about boy genius graduate students and their breath-through page rank algorithm etc. The people around me (maybe bloggers, too?) seemed as, or more, interested in Google's simple 'noncommercial' design and use of the word 'googol', than in the accuracy of Google's results. On the plus side for my take, there's likely evidence that search users didn't consciously value search algorithms like they do now. In the 90s, people were mostly after 'total number of pages indexed'

vidarh 6y ago

Notably, at a the time, a lot of those of us who were "power users" tended to stick with Altavista longer in many cases because Google was at first not so much better that they could compete with highly precise use of Altavista's search operators. Google was much more noticeably better for non-technical who didn't know how to improve their results and didn't care to learn, but at the time that didn't translate to a massive numerical advantage in terms of users.

uniqueid 6y ago
Yep, I also stuck with AltaVista for a couple years (or maybe Fast? Long time ago) because the I didn't find Google's results significantly better. I don't think it was the operators. In the late 00's Google's operators were the +traditional +plus +to +and +terms. They didn't introduce them immediately? Boy I was pissed when Google extracted that into 'verbatim mode'

mda 6y ago

No, it was better because it was much faster and results were much better. I remember those days, we (me, friends and family) were all using Altavista or lycos before, do you think we all switched to Google in a blink just because of it's spartan design?