Thread: What made Google, Google?

Just been reading this story:

Who-Are-the-Richest-People-in-Town: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed Google in 1998. I hadn't heard about it until fall of 2000 and that was from some college kids. during that time there were other search engines; Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. Remember the Yahoo TV and radio spots? So the question is, what made Google what it is today? How did they find a niche in an apparently saturated market?

interesting reading

History of Google - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.searchenginehistory.com/

Greg -

Have you read this:

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Search-Rewrote-Business-Transformed-Culture/dp/1591840880]Amazon.com: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture: John Battelle: Books[/ame]

It's a great book, and really digs into the details of how Google got its start.

The key (in my opinion, at least) is that the founders exploited the fact that none of the other search engines of the day had figured out a way to identify which pages were the most useful to the broadest set of people. Google revolutionized search by figuring out how to crack that code -- what ultimately ended up being Page Rank.

While there is no-doubt some amazingly smart people there, and it is (or at least was) a tremendously well run company, the bulk of Google's success can be directly attributed to Larry and Sergey's now-seemingly simple idea that the more pages that link to your page, the more valuable your page is.

Yup, before 1999 or so, nobody really considered that...

From what I remember, I and many others switched to Google because there were NO ads. Their homepage had the one line and a search button. The other search engines were becoming littered with ads on their main page.

I also remember that back then a banner ad on the top of yahoo's home page was $800/mo!!!

Didn't they start out either acquiring newsgroups from someone else (or using search capabilities within newsgroups)?

Originally Posted by PhxMJ

Imagine had they looked around back then and said "Eh, Yahoo, Alta Vista, HotBot -- these company's already have the search engine game locked up ... what else should we do?" And then started another company ...

Competition is everyone and there is great opportunity in just doing it better.

Agreed MJ. We have been getting a lot of these kind of posts lately. "I like this but the markets flooded so I can't do that." These guys looked at the market, analyzed it, and exploited a weakness. Simple yes, easy no. I bet they worked their butts of for months to years trying to capitalize on this.

I find it fascinating that no one thought of adjusting the scientific impact factor as an approach to improving search before google in late 1990s.