Every month Google answers 100 billion queries, we only see the results they deem relevant. Here’s a non-technical look into how they got there, what they do, and why they may have more power over us than any intelligence agency.
I do remember when everyone was excited about Google - with the colourful logo, the funny-sounding yet mathematically-based name, and their "I'm feeling lucky" button. Then I remember youtube coming online and the first new greats of the re-energised internet. I remember "Netscape" and the prominence of Yahoo and other search engines. There were quite a few knocking around. Napster was a cool sounding name and "What do you mean you can just download the song?" was quite a common question. Early attempts at building sites had you looking as much at yahoo and msn rankings as Google :) Then there were a plethora of search engines trying to secure niches, and they couldn't be ignored, then Google started buying everything and we were hearing about how awesome it was to work at their place and about the history of starting in a garage and how the underdogs with the cool motto had risen to power. Then adsense became big and people realised you could make money by letting them advertise on your site, and people thought 'wow', but by that time everything had already become much much more cut-throat. People were starting to question whether they would link to your site without 'a reciprocal' - suddenly words like 'reciprocal' meant something to the owner of a camp-site in southern England. Things started to get very competative, and 'rankings' were really a hot topic. Around this time, article marketing spawned millions of spam article directories and content-creation bots. There were tons of spam link directories where bots could post links. All anchor text was keyphrased up to the teeth, and everyone was into SEO. SEO for Google - nobody "optimised" for the other sites. The controversy was largely around which browser would win, not which search engine - everyone knew that would be Google. By mid 2000's it was basically just Google, people had stopped really caring about the others. The only blips on the radar now seem to be Yandex in Russia and of course Baidu. Apart from them and the possibility of a small portion of traffic being taken if yahoo and bing ever merge, the internet is basically governed by Google now, and it's increasingly clear that they wield more power than many governments - a supra-national self-regulating power that can make or break any business at will. that's a scary amount of power to have given anyone.
Oh yes keep the web "free", alive, but very few seem to understand Google is stealing the freedom from the moment THEY said want to make a -better web-. Who? them. How? the way they like it. Thanks for trying but you are trying just too dm hard. Suddenly a lot of rules are being dictated by G around what it's good and what's not.
Great retrospective, we shouldn't take google so easily, they are big players and should be watched closely... great read
Fun read and well explained, you have some good points there.