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The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the m

The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be". So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good. So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition. Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.

bjarneh 5y ago
> made Google what it is today is PageRank Yes, but it was no secret that Google's page ranking was based on counting links from different web-pages; I think Page/Brin even wrote a paper about this when Google was in its infancy. But Google clearly had better ranking at first, but it would not help the others if their ranking was better than Google's, since the "paid results" polluted their search results so much they became a joke. A lot of the paid results was "adult content" as well, creating a somewhat strange atmosphere during presentations if the lecturer had to preform an internet search. Although a large part of the www was adult content in the late 90's :-) The competition doomed their own business by selling search results; they really did not play the long-game, but went for the quick cash. I guess most people would have...
foxfluff 5y ago
> But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. I'd say it's both, but the force that has been driving me to use DDG more and more recently is not that it's gotten so much better but that G has gotten so much worse.
bduerst 5y ago
>but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par Worth noting that these are essentially the same. DDG scrapes a handful of sites but they lean heavily on Bing's search API (or Yandex, if you search in russian). It would be interesting if there could be some independent consumer group that would be able to grade search engine results and compare them regularly. To not only hold them accountable but give credit where it's due too.

bjarneh 5y ago

> made Google what it is today is PageRank Yes, but it was no secret that Google's page ranking was based on counting links from different web-pages; I think Page/Brin even wrote a paper about this when Google was in its infancy. But Google clearly had better ranking at first, but it would not help the others if their ranking was better than Google's, since the "paid results" polluted their search results so much they became a joke. A lot of the paid results was "adult content" as well, creating a somewhat strange atmosphere during presentations if the lecturer had to preform an internet search. Although a large part of the www was adult content in the late 90's :-) The competition doomed their own business by selling search results; they really did not play the long-game, but went for the quick cash. I guess most people would have...

foxfluff 5y ago

> But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. I'd say it's both, but the force that has been driving me to use DDG more and more recently is not that it's gotten so much better but that G has gotten so much worse.

bduerst 5y ago

>but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par Worth noting that these are essentially the same. DDG scrapes a handful of sites but they lean heavily on Bing's search API (or Yandex, if you search in russian). It would be interesting if there could be some independent consumer group that would be able to grade search engine results and compare them regularly. To not only hold them accountable but give credit where it's due too.