Back to memories of first searches – shortly after sitting staring blankly at the screen I remembered something on the wireless about a new Eurofighter. I had (and still have) no interest in the military, but it was the first thing that came into my head (the power of the spoken word….) and they had a page about it. I quickly got bored.
.-= Jon Wade recently posted: Google Helps Save Lives – Working with the Samaritans =-.

They are without a doubt a force. I suspect they would be considered by serveral governments “too large to collapse”

I especially remember the piles of nonsense you had to wade through to get to something relevant. And so often what the SERP quoted for the page was (no longer) what the destination page was saying.

They did indeed keep their search page simple. Do you think the features they’re adding now take away from that?

The real reason Google became popular and successful was not this algorithm (although without good search results it would have been a lot harder). It was their constant focus on better search to scale with the web as it grew exponentially. They developed a corporate culture around great engineering and lived and breathed it. They kept their search page simple and gave people what they wanted, great results fast. Infoseek/Disney went the portal route and used hundreds of people to produce and edit their “channels” while Search Engineering, run by me from 99-01, was cut down to 5 engineers. No effort was put into developing better infrastructure to keep up with the growing web and that is where Google put most of their effort. I tried to convince Disney that we needed to put more effort there and the most they would give me was a side site called search.go.com which was just a simpler search UI page without the portal frills. They wouldn’t even let me use the http://www.infoseek.com page to promote pure search because that is where they got all the traffic to funnel into the GO.com portal.