Why Google?

[Jay3gsm]

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Just after opinion. What is it that makes Google the default term and the default search engine for most users? You don't Yahoo! for something, you don't MSN for something but you do Google for it. Why? What did Google do/what does it do to make it the default choice?

Interested to hear what you guys think.

[Swiss]

Let me ask you this: Why do people Hoover their floors instead of vacuum them? Why do people write with Biros instead of ball point pens?

To be honest, I don't know... Right place at the right time? People pick them up as buzzwords and they seem to just stick?

[twibo]

It's very simple. Google is by far the best search engine and always has been. What I don't understand is why anyone uses anything else.

[lurker]

MSN + Yahoo both started out as portals + still are portals (news, e-mail, messenger etc etc etc.
G started out as a pure search engine and was by far the best one out there at the time, so they've entered popular venacular as the generic name for search. Poor old Ask Jeeves were there first but Joe Public just preferred Google at the time the internet first went into the public consciousness.

[Sammy aff]

Google was in the right place at the right time, by comparrison their competitors were real poor, the old AV/AOL days. Google was new clean and quick loading, and most importantly gave much better results than rivals.

People liked the idea of "two uni kids" building the se from the ground up, rather than some multi-national company, aka msn
Similar to the milliondollar home page inovation. (If MSN had done the milliondollar home page there would still be 999k pixels for sale

Now google has a huge loyal user base which will not move to others unless a
major improvement from rivals or perhaps a newbie.

G$$gle is not the same as the real google of old, in real terms they are not much better than their main rivals. But they have the fan base.
A bit like Man U really

[km8]

MSN + Yahoo both started out as portals + still are portals (news, e-mail, messenger etc etc etc.
G started out as a pure search engine and was by far the best one out there at the time

... and lately google is search, shopping, email, earth, toolbars, talk, ads news, etc.

They're a bit slicker about how they do it but the concept is the same.
So what is the *real* difference?

[Sammy aff]

Archie was the first search engine...
AltaVista appeared in 1995, it was easily the largest around

From 1997 to the end of 1998, AltaVista and Inktomi were the two heavyweights

By 1999, the battle to be top dog was between AltaVista, Fast, and Northern Light

By 2000, FAST announced it had broken the 300 million-page barrier, making it the biggest search engine in the world. Later that year AltaVista also became a member of the 300 million-page club.

Google waiting in the wings, slaughtered all in the summer of 2000 breaking the 500 million page barrier.

[pricethat]

Sammy Aff the internet historian

Cant wait to see the internet archeologists in years to come

[monk-i]

Google is crap! Yahoo and MSNs search results these days are better than G's. It does go in swings and roundabouts. I think currently it could be the start of a power shift. I know im currently mixing more between MSN and Yahoo. I know G started off by techno wannabes saying oh dont use that use G. Now they are changing and saying the opposite. It will change again. If anything is certain change is certain in life and G is no different. Cant wait for it to happen niether.

[pricethat]

Seems i am following you around this forum today little monk-i, but i have to ruffle your feathers a little saying that msn results are the worst i ever saw out of all the big three. I do agree that yahoo results seem to be much better than googles lately.

MSN? i mean come on monk-i

[km8]

Agreed about MSN.
Where Google have the "relevance" factor in the algo, MSN made a mistake and put in a "random" factor. Totally loopy results most times.

[drivetowin]

Sammy Aff

I must confess I've never heard of anyone who says they use Google because it was started by 'two uni kids', I doubt most people who use Google know whether it was started by two uni kids, a mongolian pygmy or a whole tribe of sex starved amazonian women!!

We all have ourselves to 'blame' (if thats the right word) for Google's success, it's probably the best example of viral marketing going - back in the dim and distant past when I had hair, youth and vitality and everyone used Yahoo! a few techie people started using Google, they showed the people in sales, they showed the people in admin, everyone started showing other people in their homes and the whole Google search engine dominance was born - but prinicipally because it yielded good results.

Personally, on the whole I still believe it yields the best results (though as affiliates we may not like them sometimes) though I would agree with other posters that Yahoo! has improved considerably again lately.

I think MSN has absolutely excellent results (but then it has a disproportionate number of my pages in the top ten search results for loads of terms so I'm biased )

[pricethat]

a whole tribe of sex starved amazonian women!!

What are they like then Keith?

[drivetowin]

They spend all day eating peanuts

[djs]

Not that I know as much as you guys about this but I must say that I favour MSN over Google by far. If I break the name down of my site into three words than I am number one on MSN and also high in the rankings for other configurations of my site name. However Google only list me under my full name and then only updates when it pleases although I submit the sitemap to them. Whilst I appreciate you guys would probably look at my site and say ah but he's not being listed in google because!!! ( and I wish I new what that because was) I still say at this present time use MSN for search and not Google