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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It was the first one that didn't suck and it was the first one that made money.

Infoseek was the first search engine I saw. They were thinking of charging people for subscriptions.

Altavista came out with a bigger and fresher index, for a year or two they were the best, but they were being totally rolled by spammers, just like the others.

Then there was Google, which was spam resistant and much more relevant than the competition. Then Google figured out how to make money and nobody's caught up since.

Arguably Bing "doesn't suck" but it doesn't make money.

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"It was the first one that didn't suck"

That's also untrue. I remember being viscerally mad at Yahoo for moving away from Inktomi because Inktomi results were much better for what I searched for...or I had gotten my searches to work for Inktomi. Who cares? Eventually, Google got better, and I started using them.

I use a lot of Google services, but when I search the web I use Google because it works. Searches have very little traction. The only thing it takes to move my searches elsewhere is consistently better results. All it takes for me to try a new search engine is Google not working well a few more times a month.

Lycos was ok in the super early days but as the amount of content increased a simple search engine was no longer effective. Inktomi was great because it didn't have portal-bloat and it had pretty high quality results. But when google came around it blew everyone out of the water because not only were the results generally of higher quality but it was enormously faster. Combined with a smart datacenter strategy and a smart advertising strategy they dominated the market with ease.

Edit: To follow up, google was able to deliver better results (due to pagerank) faster (due to map/reduce and sharding) cheaper (due to highly automated data centers filled with commodity hardware). This combination set them up for dominance, the ability to generate better, more context appropriate ads (due to pagerank, map/reduce, etc, etc. and an effectively massive excess of processing power per search) and the ability to be profitable at a much lower CPM for ads (due to cheaper operations) was what allowed them to become a multi-billion dollar company and leave all other search companies in the dust.

Before using Google, I have been using both Altavista and Yahoo for searches. The results from those older search engines really sucked for me.

I remember sitting at a local Internet Cafe, frustrated that I wasn't finding what I searched for. The I saw somebody using Google and thought I should give it a try.

The difference that I experienced with Google was humongous, and it made an instant convert out of me, even though in general I'm pretty conservative about throwing away tools that work. Really, it wasn't even funny how better Google was.

This was happening in 2001.

Exactly.

In the 90's I remember using Lycos, Altavista, HotBot, AskJeeves and others which have faded from my memory. Then along came this new 'google' search engine & I never went back to the others.

I still have a note scribbled on an old address book (the dead tree kind) saying "www.google.com - it's a new search engine".

It was certainly not 'the first'. Just the first really good one.

Highway 61 was the greatest! It combined results from several of the popular engines and provided the best results until google came along.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980205031323/http://www.highway... /nostalgia

Same with Ixquick. Looks like it's still around, and going for the "privacy" angle, like DDG.

http://ixquick.com/

To be honest Google results start to have a lot of spam in them. Even the US results. In the past, US results were rather clear, and localized ones for most other countries were .. well.. not very good.

Bing doesn't really do better, but that's the state of the engines right now anyway.

If you look for something specific, Google dumbs it out too. In the early days it didn't do that and you could search for good stuff. Now you get what everyone gets, whatever you're typing.

Sometimes it helps to put a plus in front of every search term, that does at least prevent google from replacing the most specific term of your query with the least specific misspelling. That is especially helpful for programming terms that are minor variations of human language terms, just compare the searches

  scala hlist

and

  +scala +hlist

Thw first doesn't contain a single result that is relevant to the query.

In my experience the results of those two queries are almost identical: http://imgur.com/a/qGVAn#3ilhM

> It was the first one that didn't suck and it was the first one that made money.

That's a bit of a tautology. "It dominates because it was the first to produce a dominant product."

My favorite was Dogpile. edit: it still exists. I still like dogpile.

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