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Comment by lugg | Hacker News Reader

This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999.

Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.

Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design.

That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.

I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.

I was quite young at the time but made the same transition for the same reasons.

I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.

I remember google having vastly more useful results than its competitors at that time. The uncluttered design was a bonus.

I remember google having equivalent or even inferior results to yahoo search for quite a while, especially in niche topics like sports and music. The differences in algorithms just didn’t matter much for average case queries.

I think the difference in algorithms matters even less now, and that google’s modern advantage is not in ranking algorithms but in automated display of structured data, like sports league results, filmography for an actor, etc., and work around knowledge graph methods to automate that stuff.

Early google was unequivocally only differentiated by branding and sparse design.

Before people figured out how to game PageRank, Google was spooky. Unreal. Incredibly good results.

I actually postulate it was due to their ability to parse queries in an effective way, combined with the speed (and sure, probably design) of results [1]. From what I recall at the time, and even to this day, Google does a better job of determine exact match vs question (and finding subject matter) based results.

[1] https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/

Yes. Their NLP is unparalleled. I'd say the uncluttered UI, query parsing, and search algorithm were all the major factors.

"That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage."

It wasn't just the simplicity. Google was also a lot faster, and had no ads!

How ironic that advertisement later became their bread and butter.

Yes. It was clean AND fast when the rest of the internet was pretty clunky in the late 90's. I think that speed investment paid off HUGELY.

I don't think they are comparable. DuckDuckGo federate the results of other search engines (e.g. Bing) and add its own sauce on top of it. There is a limit to what it can do.

Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.

YUP!

When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.

Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.

And this was in 1998 or so...

Google was clearly better at the beginning. I remember those days, and how Yahoo! put a bunch of other search engines at the bottom of its own results (Altavista, Excite, Lycos, etc). So it was easy to compare. When Google showed up, it was pretty obvious the game was over.

The main reason? "And" searches. Brilliant.

AltaVista had support for boolean operators; I and many other techies became very practiced in composing complex queries. It was my favorite search engine.

Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.

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