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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I would argue against this lack of competitors you mentioned. We were using AskJeeves, Webcrawler, yahoo, msn, aol, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot and a myriad of local service providers' homepages.
Google came much later than all of those, but it was better. How? I don't know, I was just a kid that got better results from Google than any of those other places.
Just because Google DESTROYED the competition before you got there doesn't mean that there wasn't any.
Exactly. I would say more specifically, Google's PageRank algorithm for prioritizing results was genius because it excluded the vast oceans of word-spam sites that floated to the top of all the other search engines.
Yes! Thanks for reminding me. Some pages would just have a dictionary of popular words in their Metadata so if you were searching for N*Sync (shut up, it was the 90s!) you'd have to scroll through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you found anything related to what you wanted.
One only has to remember all the ‘keywords’ under a youtube video back in the day, it was a nightmare to whittle things down to what you wanted
If we're talking "back in the day" you had to remember WHICH website you found the video on, because everyone self published, or chose one of hundreds of sites to submit their content to.
You might as well be out of business if you're result comes up on the second page of Google. :)
Some comedian said that in a comedic way IIRC. It kind of stuck with me and definately holds some truth. No one clicks on the second page unless they are desperate.
At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.
They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren't playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.
The reason it was better is that the other search engines used the programmer-entered data in a page’s title, meta tags, and headings to categorize the page’s content, whereas google also used the text of links pointing to that page to categorize the page.
Google crowdsourced categorization to content consumers, ie people acting in the same role as searcher.
In a way, it’s an excellent example of the concept of negotiated identity.
Remember when they got rid of Jeeves?
I wonder what's he's doing now? I hope Jeeves found a nice Billionaire to work for.
Have you never seen The Remains of the Day?
Fwiw I was aware of a number of those, hence why in the OP I mention: "and few really good competitors." That wasn't to suggest there were few total competitors, only that there were few really good competitors, which I think is generally the case any time you have a large number of, well, anything tbh.
May be rather dismissive, but it's not a new observation by any means.
Guess ya had to be there, then.