5 ms·

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. Just curi

> Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale. Just curious, which ones? I remember Google felt so far above any other search engine for a very long time.

hogFeast 5y ago
Essentially all of their tech was taken from Robin Li and AltaVista/DEC. Brin did a lot of the implementation work, Page did nothing (a lot of the work he did do, didn't scale, and was highly inferior to existing work as he wasn't a strong programmer...I think he provided a server room or something, he was the snake oil salesman). The actual technological innovation in the search product was minimal (the stuff they did later to scale was pure innovation, but that came much later). They largely purchased their position (for a good price).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cbsmith 5y ago
  The tech was "stolen" from HITS/IBM Research. Because of their success with their initial data center approach AltaVista was arguably one of the last to shift to a model that more closely resembled the one Google employed, but they certainly did a very fine job of it (late mover advantage and all that). I still liked AllTheWeb's data centers somewhat better, but at that point the differences were pretty small. I wouldn't agree with your characterization of Brin & Page's contributions, but their direct technical contributions to Google by that time were at best marginally greater than Yang's, so it's not really relevant anyway. Google definitely had some great tech, but the extent to which that won them the game is more myth than reality. Their aggressive strategic moves are really what made them successful.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    I worked at IBM TJ Watson research at the time. It's hard to "steal" from IBM, because at the time I was there, IBM's #1 problem was getting its research into the world. In 1996, I worked in a group on digital cash payment schemes, digital checking, years before PayPal, they had a trusted enclave (CITADEL PCMCIA card), we had a MIME plugin for Mosaic and Unix email that would do peer to peer digital money transfers, and when it came time to ask "when are we going to try to productize this", the answer came back "we talked with banks and will be ready to do a pilot project in 5 years" This is much like Steve Jobs "stealing" GUI, Smalltalk, and Ethernet from PARC and claiming there was no innovation. At that stage, shipping something consumers can use is innovation. If you were a techie/engineer in 1998, as opposed to a general consumer (of which there were very few), Google results WERE better than AltaVista and competitors. The early adopters and pioneers switched because like with Chrome v1, a lot of the value proposition was obvious. The bigger question perhaps is why didn't their competitors react quickly to prevent their rise, and I think the answer to that is in general, once a company makes a large splash, and gets the public attention, it's hard for others to overcome the free value from being the thought leader. This is true of Apple and true of Tesla in cars. Tesla makes the best EV right now. It's sexy, it's fast, and Elon Musk commands the world's attention. One day, other brands will catch up, they'll be Tesla competitors just as good, but no one will care, and Tesla -- if Musk doesn't fsck it up -- will continue to have a halo effect, a reality distortion field.
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      Totally agree with your characterization of the nature of the "theft", which is why I put it in quotes.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
cbsmith 5y ago
Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo. No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results (regardless if they were), they'd be more inclined to rewrite their queries and look farther down in the search results, rather than try using another search engine. Beyond the obvious revenue & marketshare benefits, this helped Google two-fold technically: it gave them better data on query rewrites and search results. The hoops you had to jump through to match our exceed their performance were substantial.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results This is super-interesting; where might one read more about these studies? Also, when were the studies done? I'm curious about the "when" because I think Google's reputation has slipped quite a bit.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    These were done around 2004-2006 IIRC, I don't know if the brand impact today is the same as it was back then. I'll see if I can find publications, but I think most, if not all of it, was not published. Even when you told people that we were substituting in different search engines and the presentation and layout was not indicative of where the results came from, putting a Google logo on the page produced a measurable difference in behaviour -far more so than changes to the results themselves (admittedly, we never presented ridiculous results, like say results from an entirely different query or a just random landing pages, but we did present them with, for example, purely paid search results). In general though, consumer confirmation bias is not that surprising, right? Particularly with technology brands, it's pretty well established that confidence in the brand leads one to be more likely to attribute failure to one's own "mistakes" and therefore invest in further exploration of the product and/or modifying one's interactions with it. It also diminishes one's belief that another product would produce better results, therefore diminishing interest in exploring alternatives; it also leads one to perceive a product's performance as "better" when it is exactly the same.

hogFeast 5y ago

Essentially all of their tech was taken from Robin Li and AltaVista/DEC. Brin did a lot of the implementation work, Page did nothing (a lot of the work he did do, didn't scale, and was highly inferior to existing work as he wasn't a strong programmer...I think he provided a server room or something, he was the snake oil salesman). The actual technological innovation in the search product was minimal (the stuff they did later to scale was pure innovation, but that came much later). They largely purchased their position (for a good price).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cbsmith 5y ago
The tech was "stolen" from HITS/IBM Research. Because of their success with their initial data center approach AltaVista was arguably one of the last to shift to a model that more closely resembled the one Google employed, but they certainly did a very fine job of it (late mover advantage and all that). I still liked AllTheWeb's data centers somewhat better, but at that point the differences were pretty small. I wouldn't agree with your characterization of Brin & Page's contributions, but their direct technical contributions to Google by that time were at best marginally greater than Yang's, so it's not really relevant anyway. Google definitely had some great tech, but the extent to which that won them the game is more myth than reality. Their aggressive strategic moves are really what made them successful.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  I worked at IBM TJ Watson research at the time. It's hard to "steal" from IBM, because at the time I was there, IBM's #1 problem was getting its research into the world. In 1996, I worked in a group on digital cash payment schemes, digital checking, years before PayPal, they had a trusted enclave (CITADEL PCMCIA card), we had a MIME plugin for Mosaic and Unix email that would do peer to peer digital money transfers, and when it came time to ask "when are we going to try to productize this", the answer came back "we talked with banks and will be ready to do a pilot project in 5 years" This is much like Steve Jobs "stealing" GUI, Smalltalk, and Ethernet from PARC and claiming there was no innovation. At that stage, shipping something consumers can use is innovation. If you were a techie/engineer in 1998, as opposed to a general consumer (of which there were very few), Google results WERE better than AltaVista and competitors. The early adopters and pioneers switched because like with Chrome v1, a lot of the value proposition was obvious. The bigger question perhaps is why didn't their competitors react quickly to prevent their rise, and I think the answer to that is in general, once a company makes a large splash, and gets the public attention, it's hard for others to overcome the free value from being the thought leader. This is true of Apple and true of Tesla in cars. Tesla makes the best EV right now. It's sexy, it's fast, and Elon Musk commands the world's attention. One day, other brands will catch up, they'll be Tesla competitors just as good, but no one will care, and Tesla -- if Musk doesn't fsck it up -- will continue to have a halo effect, a reality distortion field.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    Totally agree with your characterization of the nature of the "theft", which is why I put it in quotes.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

cbsmith 5y ago

Inktomi, Altavista, AllTheWeb, all later under Yahoo. No question about the "feel", but it's amazing how perception fuels reality. We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results (regardless if they were), they'd be more inclined to rewrite their queries and look farther down in the search results, rather than try using another search engine. Beyond the obvious revenue & marketshare benefits, this helped Google two-fold technically: it gave them better data on query rewrites and search results. The hoops you had to jump through to match our exceed their performance were substantial.

JohnBooty 5y ago
We did a lot of studies of this, and one of the more interesting ones was that if you told people they were seeing Google search results This is super-interesting; where might one read more about these studies? Also, when were the studies done? I'm curious about the "when" because I think Google's reputation has slipped quite a bit.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  These were done around 2004-2006 IIRC, I don't know if the brand impact today is the same as it was back then. I'll see if I can find publications, but I think most, if not all of it, was not published. Even when you told people that we were substituting in different search engines and the presentation and layout was not indicative of where the results came from, putting a Google logo on the page produced a measurable difference in behaviour -far more so than changes to the results themselves (admittedly, we never presented ridiculous results, like say results from an entirely different query or a just random landing pages, but we did present them with, for example, purely paid search results). In general though, consumer confirmation bias is not that surprising, right? Particularly with technology brands, it's pretty well established that confidence in the brand leads one to be more likely to attribute failure to one's own "mistakes" and therefore invest in further exploration of the product and/or modifying one's interactions with it. It also diminishes one's belief that another product would produce better results, therefore diminishing interest in exploring alternatives; it also leads one to perceive a product's performance as "better" when it is exactly the same.