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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

google maps? If you're going to claim mapquest existed before that then you'd need to remove ipod, iphone, ipad from the list above. All of those had products that came before but weren't hits.

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In addition to maps Gmail, and Google Search were category defining implementations. They bought YouTube and have steadily increased it’s capabilities and have made it into a category defining implementation.

Google Search wasn’t fundamentally different than Altavista, just marginally better. Had Yahoo! not bought Altavista, there’s a chance it might’ve stayed competitive with Google.

I strongly disagree with this. Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist and just a search field and the results made it category defining. And the results were way better as far as my memory goes.

> Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist

Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.

Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition.

There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.

AltaVista was absolutely great! I got way more interesting content through them! Their death was a real loss that finally forced me to use Google, and not for the better.

From my recollection, the unique thing about google search wasn't that it was good. All of those search engines (and more) were good at some point. The unique thing is that Google remained good for 10+ years. The others tended to get significantly less good pretty quickly.

We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.

No, it was fundamentally different. Altavista was all about returning you as many results as it could. Google was all about returning the best results first, so it didn’t matter how many results came back.

It's also important to note that Google Analytics, while dated now, and technically an acquisition, was category-defining in how it anchored the concept that analytics should be something every company gets for free. The competition at the time was IBM! And of course, it allowed Google to gain a foothold on every page and set cookies wherever it desired.

https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-...

> Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011.

> Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.

Google Maps was the first good “AJAX” like map (god it’s been a long time since I used that term), so yeah, I’ll give you that one. Google Earth however was a rebrand of Keyhole which they acquired.

FWIW, a lot of Google Maps came through acquisitions, too. But I think Google gets credit in this context for AJAXifying it and integrating tech/data with it in category-defining ways.

"Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application. After additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a real time traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2] The service's front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites,[3] and offers a locator for businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world. Google Map Maker allowed users to collaboratively expand and update the service's mapping worldwide but was discontinued from March 2017. However, crowdsourced contributions to Google Maps were not discontinued as the company announced those features would be transferred to the Google Local Guides program."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps

Yep, I was aware of the acquisition. The work to make what we think of as Google Maps today happened after the acquisition. That’s why I mentioned Google Earth as a counter example, as it fundamentally didn’t change (obviously got better, but didn’t change in a foundational way) post acquisition unlike Maps did.

You’re correct - Maps is a good example. I think the relative point still stands though. On the whole, Apple releases fewer higher-signal products and a better track record of industry wide impact.

Well technically OpenStreetMap seems to predate Google Maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

Do you have some evidence that OpenStreetMaps had a user experience similar to Google Maps in 2004? My recollection is it did not. It was like at best like mapquest. Click an arrow on the edge of the map, wait for the page to reload.

There were several maps before Google Maps but they didn't provide the smooth experience that Google Maps provides. Just like there were 100s of PDAs before iPhone but they didn't provide the smooth experience of iPhone.

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