In the beginning, was the web - various disparate pages scattered around the Internet with no real way of finding what you want other than following links or word of mouth. Things like the Metaweb started to appear - directories of web sites, the most successful of these, of course, was Yahoo! Soon, however, even these were not always enough - you still need to know exactly what you were looking for to drill down to the right category. Thus came the search engines - a number of early ones, possibly the best of which was Infoseek. Then, along came AltaVista - the first (IMO) killer search engine (back in the days when it was altavista.digital.com, a research project at DEC), with a clear lead in the quality of its results. Four years ago, however, it lost the crown when Google arrived - even in beta the new kid on the block was a clear winner.
The number one reason why Google was (and still is) the search engine of choice is the fact that it's pretty much the best at finding what you're looking for - and doing so blindingly fast. Add to this a clean interface with unobtrusive text-based adverts (which are in any case tied to your search query) and you're on to a real winner. It helps that Google has the 'cool' factor, with loads of nifty features such as the experiments at Google Labs, plus fun stuff like the holiday logos. It's still rooted in the research project at Stanford that begat the company, for example the announcement mailing list is still the same Yahoo! Group it was back before Google, Inc. existed.
In addition to the main search (including cached versions of the searched pages - invaluable when servers are down or pages have been removed), there are special searches that restrict to useful sub-sets of the web, and a fairly effective image search. Google Groups provides a comprehensive NetNews archive (admittedly acquired second-hand from the failing DejaNews) and there's a comprehensive directory done using The Open Directory Project plus Google extras (pagerank etc). The Google Toolbar is an invaluable add-on (sadly only for MSIE) linking to the main Google features, allowing easy navigation through search results (find search terms buttons, experimental forward and back buttons). Oh, and if you still haven't found what you're looking for, try Google Answers and get a human on the job.
Probably the best publicised new feature is Google News - an aggregator of thousands of news sources from the likes of the BBC and major newspapers down to sites like The Register and Slashdot. The nifty bit is the way that relevant stories are grouped together, allow you to easily find extended coverage from multiple sites. Google Web APIs provides a web services interface to the search engine, allowing you to write your own front end (and do other cool stuff). Today, the toolbar also popped up a new feature - Google Compute, getting in on the distributed computing act (for those not already doing Seti@Home or whatever), and I also found the mail-order catalogue search which looks interesting. See this page for more Google stuff.
Google now seems to have reached the point where it's almost synonymous with "search engine" - hence the appearance of the verb "To Google" - what really tipped this off to me was the use of said verb in Tuesday's US episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but on reflection, I realised that I've heard, and indeed used it a fair bit recently. If that's not a measure of success, I don't know what is. Few other websites get mentions in the context of TV fiction (eBay being the only other example that springs to mind).
How long can Google continue to rule the roost? Will a new contender come along with even better searching and do to Google what Google did to AltaVista, or will Google continue to develop, staying ahead of the pack? Certainly new engines crop up from time to time and get mentions on the likes of Slashdot, but none of them has yet gained any real popularity. In any case, as long as Google continue to do what they're doing and don't transmute into a horrible, bloated portal, I'll remain a fan.
Everybody likes to Google
October 20 2002, 14:22:13 UTC 18 years ago
Companies are often annoyed when their tradename goes native and becomes lower-cased: hoover, xerox, sellotape. It's really the ultimate flattery, and I suspect 'googling' still means 'Googling'.