“If a GoTo user looks for ‘New York Yankees,’ the first 10 choices are paid advertisers (‘Buy Yankees gear at Fogdog Sports’). On the 11th try you finally get Yankees.com, the official site of the world champs. (On Google, this comes up first.)”
So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
I think in general it's the wrong conclusion to draw that Google won because they had a simpler layout. That would have been an incredibly flimsy moat. They won because the had much better search results.
Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.
Funny as they always seem to forget the hardware side of search engines. Google was incredibly fast compared to its competitors because they were among the first to store their whole index in RAM rather than on hard drives. They were among the first to install huge data center with computer blades that could be changed in an instant in case of failure. As an early user, I was on board as early as 99, I was amazed by the response speed of Google and its bare style quite dépouillé.
I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed you to choose for yourself.
After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google were any better than those provided by others?
In other interpretations of Google's success is the auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public, i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
If you haven’t done a search in awhile on Bing it’s also very horrible. In many search’s there are only 1 or 2 organic results in the traditional sense.
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.
Google in 1999: Search engines escape the portal matrix
(cybercultural.com)29 points by speckx 17 hours ago | 35 comments
Comments
So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.
me: "Here, I'll look for that using google, it's just about the best search engine around right now."
colleague: "If it's really that good, why haven't I heard of it?"
me: "You just did"
I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed you to choose for yourself.
After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google were any better than those provided by others?
In other interpretations of Google's success is the auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public, i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.