Google became the leader in Internet search in a relatively short period of time, supplanting the search engines that came before it. It gave us a new approach to search. But the web has changed. Is Google's approach running out of steam? Could we see another search engine come along and supplant Google with a different approach to search? This article considers Google's rise, the limitations of its current search philosophy, and how other contenders are trying to solve the same problem.
As far as many people are concerned, there is only one search engine. The name Google is almost synonymous with the web. So powerful is Google's position, as it sits on just about every browser toolbar and handles around 70% of US Internet searches, that anyone under thirty will probably find it hard to remember that it wasn't always this way.
Before Google, there was real competition in the search engine market. Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler, HotBot and Infoseek at one time or another had genuine aspirations to be leader of the pack, yet the majority of these engines have been reduced to the occupation of niche markets, becoming nostalgic memories of the way things used to be on the web before 1998. That was the year when the Google phenomenon really began to take off, forever changing the way people search for information online.
Google moves the goalposts
When Google took the world by storm, it was to an unprecedented fanfare of hype about its search technology. The search engines of the time were either directory based, like Yahoo, or used a search algorithm based on analyzing page content to determine relevancy, like AltaVista. Both of these approaches were deeply unsatisfactory, the first because directories tended to be so incomplete, and the second because so many of the results were wide of the mark.
This state of affairs often required surfers to waste time making multiple searches on different engines to find what they were looking for. Even then, they very often had the uneasy sense that they were somehow missing it, however convinced they were that it must be out there somewhere.
The market was more than ready for Google, with its new search technology based on analyzing the links between sites to determine relevance to search terms. The core idea that underpinned this approach was that the more incoming or back links a site had, the higher its perceived value by other members of the web community and therefore the higher its deserved ranking in the search results. This, inevitably, still neglected many sites with strong content but few inbound links; nonetheless, it was a revelation from the perspective of searchers who subjectively felt as though Google spoke directly to them and understood their requirements like no search engine before.
Almost overnight, much of the lottery aspect went out of Internet searching. By and large, the results returned by Google worked. For the first time it was possible to use the Internet with a reasonable degree of efficiency. From a distance it can be difficult to understand the impact of this, but at the time it was the online equivalent of exchanging your Ford for a Ferrari.
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