Myth: PageRank was the secret to Google's success
It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess.
To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast.
And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits).
Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user.
(Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)
It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess.
To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast.
And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits).
Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user.
(Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)