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Google was created in 1998 and, in just four years' time, it debuted as an innovative tool on American television in prime time. It took Google Search only eight years to become so ubiquitous in Western society that Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English dictionaries officially added it to their lists as a transitive verb, in upper or lower case. Today, the phrase "Google it" has dethroned any variant of "doing an online search" and jokes about the misreading of the root word have become obsolete (with Xander's haircut) .
Google is the default search engine, homepage and online landing platform for people around the world. Google is so rooted in online culture that it has always been present. As if, when Tim Berners-Lee started the first page of the Web in 1991, he typed the URL into a Google branded search bar.
By the end of the 1990s, dozens of online search engines were competing for attention, featuring cute mascots, smart branding, and technically distinct Web browsing solutions. The Google search engine went online in September 1997, a year before Google's creation by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their advantage was a patented algorithm called PageRank, which sorted websites according to their relevance or the number of times they were cited by other pages. Most other search engines have found results based on keyword density, but the Brin and Page method is focused on human capture between websites. Google quickly devoured the competition.
PageRank has been the backbone of Google Search for 20 years, with the Internet becoming a ubiquitous tool necessary for modern existence. And as the Internet has developed, Google too. It's not just the world's first website, but it's the heart of a publicly traded, for-profit, hundreds-billion-dollar conglomerate.
Google holds the knowledge of humanity in its search bar, and it has the ability to shape large-scale conversations. Imagine the Internet as a million volumes of books, all filled with essential information (and photos of cats). Google is only one book in this series, providing only the information that its authors – namely the algorithms – deem worthy of being. Given Google's dominance as a search engine, everyone reads the same book, while 999,999 other items collect dust on the shelves.
Although the search becomes more personalized, tailored to the location of the user, to interest centers, purchases, email subscriptions and previous surveys, these results are always fully recorded in the written book. by Google. Simply by deciding what information the entire world should see, Google has the power to create or destroy businesses of all sizes, to alter election results, to influence public opinion and to reinforce unconscious bias. developers themselves. here's how The Guardian put it in 2016:
For example, look for the word "man" and you get images almost entirely composed of white men, but of varying age. A search for the word "woman" also reveals an overwhelming majority of young white women. Considering that the majority of the world's population is not white, we immediately see how white prejudices, centered on the West – from racial and sexual beliefs to cultural norms of beauty and value – dominate the very way in which Web works and what stories he is talking about humanity.
Google is the Westernized and for-profit steward of our growing digital reality, but that was not always the case. By the end of the 1990s, Google Search was competing with a handful of other engines, most of which are now obsolete. Here is a return on three search engines that Google has engulfed almost 20 years ago.
Ask Jeeves / Ask.com
Ask Jeeves was a character-driven search engine, so far. Established in 1996, Ask Jeeves featured a well-dressed valet who was supposed to fetch research results and was able to understand the questions asked in the daily formulation. Natural language processing is still difficult for developers today – ask Siri no matter what – so it was an intimidating goal before the year 2000.
Ask Jeeves lasted until about 2005, when it was renamed Ask.com. The company has attempted to invade Yahoo! The Answers territory focusing on a real questions-and-answers site, but Ask.com ended its search engineering in 2010.
Ask.com is ranked No. 128 in the world, according to Alexa.
Dogpile
If the knowledge of humanity is a series of books, Dogpile is an attempt to let people read more than one volume. The site, founded in 1995, is a meta-search engine that collects results from a variety of sources. The site's mission is based on the data: in 2007, Dogpile partnered with the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania to study the results of the four most popular search engines. of the time, Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and Windows Live. Here is a quick summary of what researchers have found:
"The results of this latest study underline the fact that there are big differences between the four most popular search engines." The overlap between the four search engines on the first page of the search results does not help. average of 0.6% for a given request. "
Dogpile is technically still alive today, although it looks like something from the early 2000's. It was its heyday – Dogpile won the award for the online residential search engine service from JD Power and Associates in 2006 and 2007.
Dogpile is ranked # 8,175 in the world, according to Alexa.
AltaVista
AltaVista was the best site to really take Google. Founded in 1995, AltaVista came from researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's laboratories and offered a fast and extensive crawler as well as an advanced search system capable of handling more than 10 million queries per day. In 1997, AltaVista was the most popular search engine, bringing in millions of revenue and becoming the exclusive backbone of Yahoo's search results.
The site was hit hard by the bursting of the Internet bubble in the early 2000s. AltaVista changed hands a few times, but found itself in Yahoo's portfolio in 2003. Yahoo officially shut down AltaVista in 2013.
AltaVista is ranked 534,615 in the world, according to Alexa.
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