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In addition to maps Gmail, and Google Search were category defining implementations. They bought YouTube and have steadily increased it’s capabilities and have

by suture 4y ago

In addition to maps Gmail, and Google Search were category defining implementations. They bought YouTube and have steadily increased it’s capabilities and have made it into a category defining implementation.

jsjohnst 4y ago
Google Search wasn’t fundamentally different than Altavista, just marginally better. Had Yahoo! not bought Altavista, there’s a chance it might’ve stayed competitive with Google.
- suture 4y ago
  I strongly disagree with this. Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist and just a search field and the results made it category defining. And the results were way better as far as my memory goes.
  - jsjohnst 4y ago
    > Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
    - oarsinsync 4y ago
      Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition. There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
      - m3talsmith 4y ago
        AltaVista was absolutely great! I got way more interesting content through them! Their death was a real loss that finally forced me to use Google, and not for the better.
      - toast0 4y ago
        From my recollection, the unique thing about google search wasn't that it was good. All of those search engines (and more) were good at some point. The unique thing is that Google remained good for 10+ years. The others tended to get significantly less good pretty quickly. We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.
- mcphage 4y ago
  No, it was fundamentally different. Altavista was all about returning you as many results as it could. Google was all about returning the best results first, so it didn’t matter how many results came back.
btown 4y ago
It's also important to note that Google Analytics, while dated now, and technically an acquisition, was category-defining in how it anchored the concept that analytics should be something every company gets for free. The competition at the time was IBM! And of course, it allowed Google to gain a foothold on every page and set cookies wherever it desired. https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-history-google-analytics-part-one/ https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-... > Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011. > Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.

by suture 4y ago

jsjohnst 4y ago

Google Search wasn’t fundamentally different than Altavista, just marginally better. Had Yahoo! not bought Altavista, there’s a chance it might’ve stayed competitive with Google.

suture 4y ago
I strongly disagree with this. Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist and just a search field and the results made it category defining. And the results were way better as far as my memory goes.
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  > Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
  - oarsinsync 4y ago
    Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition. There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
    - m3talsmith 4y ago
      AltaVista was absolutely great! I got way more interesting content through them! Their death was a real loss that finally forced me to use Google, and not for the better.
    - toast0 4y ago
      From my recollection, the unique thing about google search wasn't that it was good. All of those search engines (and more) were good at some point. The unique thing is that Google remained good for 10+ years. The others tended to get significantly less good pretty quickly. We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.
mcphage 4y ago
No, it was fundamentally different. Altavista was all about returning you as many results as it could. Google was all about returning the best results first, so it didn’t matter how many results came back.

btown 4y ago

It's also important to note that Google Analytics, while dated now, and technically an acquisition, was category-defining in how it anchored the concept that analytics should be something every company gets for free. The competition at the time was IBM! And of course, it allowed Google to gain a foothold on every page and set cookies wherever it desired. https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-history-google-analytics-part-one/ https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-... > Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011. > Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.