The search engines that existed before Google and how the current king of the internet managed to beat them

Google has earned – year after year, click by click – the nickname “King of the Internet.”

In its 20-year history, the world’s most used search engine has grown into an empire with eight services, including the Chrome browser, the Gmail email service and the YouTube video platform.

They all have over 1,000 million monthly users and bill over $100,000 million per year.

But your search engine is still the star productSince September 4, 1998, engineers Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched a project to organize information that would take them very far.

Today, Google receives millions of searches and its founders are billionaires.

Your browser’s “bots” allow you to track, sort, and classify all information on the internetconverting it into links and offering an ordered list according to its own criteria.

Its dominance is such that it is difficult to remember what Internet searches looked like before Google.

But there were other search engines that were successful before the “King of the Internet” dethroned them.

WebCrawler

WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full, one-word text results. It was born four years before Google.

Your name means “web spider” or “web crawler””, that is, the computer programs that still inspect the network today.

This is explained by Google itself on its website: “We use web spiders to organize information from web pages and other publicly available content in the search engine.”

WebCrawler’s creator was Brian Pinkerton, a student at the University of Washington, USA, but the Internet services company America Online (now AOL) bought it in 1995. In 2001, it was acquired by InfoSpace.

WebCrawler became very popular in a short time… but was quickly overshadowed by Lycos.

Lycos

In 1995, Lycos arrived, a research project from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, which would later be purchased by Terra, a subsidiary of Telefónica.

Lycos experienced his moment of glory during He tree of the “dotcom”: It became the most visited website in the world in 1999.

But the merger with Terra was a failure. Eventually the company was sold to a South Korean company and later to an Indian online marketing company.

High view

Also in 1995, AltaVista was born, one of the search engines most affected by Google’s success.

It was innovative: it used a fast tracker and a minimalist design. But Google offered something better and took the market away.

Yahoo bought it in 2003. Ten years later it was seen forced to close it.

excite

Excite was launched in late 1995 and continued through the 1990s one of the most recognized brands in the United Statesbut with the turn of the century came its decline.

Page and Brin tried to get it before that happened. Rejecting the purchase “was a stupid decision,” journalist Justin Rohrlich said in 2010.

Yahoo

Yahoo is still fighting Google, but it was born before… can you guess the year? nineteen ninety-five!

In the first years it proved to be successful. His mistake was that he started lining his pockets with ads without improving the quality of the search engine, something in which Google defeated him.

How did Google succeed in this?

We already know that there were other search engines before Google, but the big question is how this search engine became more popular than all the others, despite having less experience and offering a similar product.

Google today controls the 90% of internet searches and more than 60% of online advertisements. For many it is a monopoly.

The commercial approach, based on the personalization of search results, and continuous innovation are the key to success.

But your algorithm It also has a lot to do with it.

Page assessment was launched in 1999 by Page and Brin, the founders of Google, and serves to measure the importance of a page on a scale of 1 to 10. It is able to solve an equation of 500 million variables and more than 2 billion terms.

“You want one answer, not billions of web pages. (…) Our systems provide useful results,” their creators explain on Google’s help site.

But Page and Brin keep secret the mathematical formula they came up with, which sets their system above the rest. Therefore They are constantly reinventing it.

Perhaps his real great achievement was understanding what users want. After all, what other company has been able to turn its name into a verb? (JO)