Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomikron | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but meta user interface relevant:

IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is slightly non-trivial.

But I agree it is the best user interface. Files and processes are a great thing, but the shell built on-top of it glues everything together and for me is the most successful interface. However it would be nice to switch interpreters online, i.e. switch between e.g. Bash or Python and "human language" (like Google Search). Interestingly DuckDuckGo provides something similar via its '!' syntax.

View on HN

I think at least at first, Google's success was definitely because of the algorithm. Existing search engines were terrible. They primarily relied on text analysis and human edited web directories. You could search for something as basic as "pet food" and get a few relevant results and then a bunch of random garbage. When Google came out using PageRank, it was a whole new world. Every tech savvy person I know switched right away, and not because of the interface.

But no doubt the simple and elegant interface helped too, and has helped them stay ahead as the other search engines have caught up with their algorithm.

I agree. That PageRank was patented is only reason Google is what they are today. They would've been copycatted to much lower revenues or market share.

That's completely untrue.

There were numerous well-understood PageRank alternatives available at the time (eg HITS was published in 1999[1]).

Google did lots of things right (good algorithm, good scaling, good UI, text-based advertising, spam handling, no portal etc), and to say it was "only PageRank" is just wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

Never heard of HITS for some reason. Thanks for the tip. A quick Google for comparisons between two give this:

http://www.slideshare.net/shatakirti/pagerank-and-hits

http://www.ijarcce.com/upload/2014/february/IJARCEE9J_a_pooj...

The first indicated PageRank has less disadvantages like spam. The second sums up the result here:

"page rank is more popular algorithm... due to the features like efficiency, feasibility, less query time cost, less susceptibility to localized links, etc which are absent in the HITS algorithm"

If that's true, then my claim would stand as HITS wouldn't have been good enough without a lot of modification. Google also got me better results than Ask that used HITS. If such claims are wrong, then you might be right. It would take more than a quick search to know.

That, and the recognition that search was a powerful conduit for ad revenue is the reason that Google is what they are today.

Jerry Yang and Yahoo did not appreciate this and missed their oppurtunity to acquire Google early on. That said, Yahoo would have fumbled it even if they had pulled the trigger.

>IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is slightly non-trivial.

Nope, it was the superior algorithm. Other search engine at the time had similarly simple interfaces, but we all moved to Google (back in 2000 or so) because of the superior results.

Slightly non-trivial? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com