4 ms·

The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started,

The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started, their dominance came from having a lightweight killer product, not the other way around.

Terr_ 2y ago
> lightweight killer product Also many of those search engines were are least partly focused on being a big curated directory of large/preferred sites. In contrast, early-Google was amazing at bringing in the other stuff from small sites (and web-forums) that didn't have an advertising/marketing budget.
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  I really miss those trees of categorised sites however because they were great for discovery of similar sites as well whole topic areas. We lost something too when we stopped doing that and replaced it with the similar site search engines and roughly tracking popularity of sites.
  - salawat 2y ago
    I mean. Lets be real. Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Now, if you want that, you have to spider. The moment you create that representation and make it available to anyone else for any level of financial gain, and it's all over. ...And given all the assholery of the typical scraper these days, yhe Web is increasingly having to do away with good faith serving to novel bots; because assholes gonna asshole. Can't have noce things.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      I'm having a little trouble parsing this comment. > Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Do you mean in the sense that the DMCA forces everyone to censor their data on demand, and therefore data cannot be both accurate (containing certain items) and public? > Now, if you want that, you have to spider. Isn't "that" already the same thing as "spidering"? Or do you mean that "you" (i.e. the data consumer) have to do your own in-house spidering, because nobody is allowed to centralize the work and then redistribute (complete) data?
marginalia_nu 2y ago
Originally they were indeed quite a good search engine amidst a sea of less good ones, in part because their tech was simply better, in part because they weren't as-yet merged with an advertisement company. Like Page and Brin put this up themselves as a reason why their contemporary competitors sucked[1]. Though their subsequent en-shittening has been in a relative competitive vacuum, really Bing sometimes with different front-ends. I think today their main sticking power is how integrated they are. Not just with their browser, but the search engine with maps and what have you. Like if you build a search engine that just does internet search, users are confused why it can't tell them local restaurants' opening hours. [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Appendix A
gpderetta 2y ago
Google was vastly better than the alternative when they started. It wasn't even close. The problem is that the alternatives then looked like google right now.
waingake 2y ago
The article is about Google being at its best when it had the least competition. You should read it.
- n4r9 2y ago
  It rose to prominence because it was better than its competitors. A perceived lack of competition didn't make it good.
- cjmb 2y ago
  That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt. It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase. Source: am author
  - n4r9 2y ago
    You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case. To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.
axpvms 2y ago
Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)

Terr_ 2y ago

> lightweight killer product Also many of those search engines were are least partly focused on being a big curated directory of large/preferred sites. In contrast, early-Google was amazing at bringing in the other stuff from small sites (and web-forums) that didn't have an advertising/marketing budget.

PaulKeeble 2y ago
I really miss those trees of categorised sites however because they were great for discovery of similar sites as well whole topic areas. We lost something too when we stopped doing that and replaced it with the similar site search engines and roughly tracking popularity of sites.
- salawat 2y ago
  I mean. Lets be real. Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Now, if you want that, you have to spider. The moment you create that representation and make it available to anyone else for any level of financial gain, and it's all over. ...And given all the assholery of the typical scraper these days, yhe Web is increasingly having to do away with good faith serving to novel bots; because assholes gonna asshole. Can't have noce things.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    I'm having a little trouble parsing this comment. > Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Do you mean in the sense that the DMCA forces everyone to censor their data on demand, and therefore data cannot be both accurate (containing certain items) and public? > Now, if you want that, you have to spider. Isn't "that" already the same thing as "spidering"? Or do you mean that "you" (i.e. the data consumer) have to do your own in-house spidering, because nobody is allowed to centralize the work and then redistribute (complete) data?

marginalia_nu 2y ago

Originally they were indeed quite a good search engine amidst a sea of less good ones, in part because their tech was simply better, in part because they weren't as-yet merged with an advertisement company. Like Page and Brin put this up themselves as a reason why their contemporary competitors sucked[1]. Though their subsequent en-shittening has been in a relative competitive vacuum, really Bing sometimes with different front-ends. I think today their main sticking power is how integrated they are. Not just with their browser, but the search engine with maps and what have you. Like if you build a search engine that just does internet search, users are confused why it can't tell them local restaurants' opening hours. [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Appendix A

gpderetta 2y ago

Google was vastly better than the alternative when they started. It wasn't even close. The problem is that the alternatives then looked like google right now.

waingake 2y ago

The article is about Google being at its best when it had the least competition. You should read it.

n4r9 2y ago
It rose to prominence because it was better than its competitors. A perceived lack of competition didn't make it good.
cjmb 2y ago
That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt. It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase. Source: am author
- n4r9 2y ago
  You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case. To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.

axpvms 2y ago

Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)