As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google.

That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).

They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.

But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.

They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time.

No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.

Agreed. They won by having the best product. And it wasn't even close.

Yep, I tried it when it had the original logo, was using Altavista until then, it was immediately obvious that they were going to win.

I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching.

The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.

Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.

It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.

I used Dogpile "because it searches all of them at once!" until I realized that only Google's results were worth anything.

The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.

So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.

Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much.

I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.

I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.

Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.

This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.

As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.

Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.

Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.

And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.

A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.

I'm older, and was there.

The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.

Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.

As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.

By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.

And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).

Interestingly enough, Envirolink's web search engine had bibliometric search ranking in 1996. It only searched a small subset of the web - mostly around environment advocacy.

I built in 1996 as an internship, it all ran as some perl scripts, and I had no idea what I was doing, of course, I was 17. I just thought it was clever to use the links between pages as a signal to the search engine. I'd never heard of citation analysis.

Google became generally available to the public in September 1998, so you're probably misremembering the timeline.

> I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice"

I think google's thing was that they got the idea, the math, and the way to do it in a practical way at scale.

I'm a bit older than you and I remember when google came out and it was so far ahead of the competition it was unbelievable.

Google was not marginally better.

I was orders of magnitude better. It is that simple.

I think that’s a fair point. What I would say in response is that you should bear in mind the times back then.

The internet had just blown up. CompSci programs at major universities were still teaching Fortran and COBOL. Linux had its very first release in 1991 I think (when the initial Google folks were in high school), people knew what BSD stood for back then, web protocols were not horribly dissimilar to the Wild West, and don’t even get me started on web standards.

In addition to all of that, they actually fixed search. There was this golden era where searching worked. The other responses you’ve had so far are much more enlightening than mine, I’m spent. I didn’t meant to come off as an ass, it’s interesting to hear your perspective on this.

(I don't think your comment deserved the downvotes, it wasn't me)

I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't.

You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)