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Google won because they started early and had the right algorithm. Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based o

Google won because they started early and had the right algorithm. Back in 1998, Google's PageRank was an innovative algorithm that calculated relevance based on counting backlinks instead of parsing the word counts in embedded HTML text like other search engines. This made Google way better than any other available search engine back then (Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.), and within weeks, everyone was switching to Google. Google then had the scale to grow with the internet.

celdon25 4y ago
Definitely the right algorithm if you want search results that are driven by marketing teams.
flatdog 4y ago
PageRank was and still is mostly marketing, there's no way Google was so much better due to PageRank. It's more likely due to their method of indexing inlinks as pseudo terms within documents that gave them the initial edge.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's a one-two punch. PageRank does undeniably help the underspecified case, indexing anchor texts adds more keywords and makes more searches underspecified.