How Lycos Almost won the Search Engine Wars

[Brad]

http://gizmodo.com/how-lycos-almost-won-the-search-engine-wars-1719546124?

[Rooftop]

Good article. How things could have been

[ergophobe]

Cool inside look. Thanks

A couple of things jump out

- nobody had the Pagerank idea even on their radar, so they were all ultimately screwed regardless of whether they had text ads or heavy ads. Pagerank was the first search engine approach that treated the web as something new, not an online version of a printed directory. Everyone else was in essentially a print mindset (sort of like the online version of those reference books at the library that would list all articles from the past year, arranged by topic). Google PR was web-native. A fundamental shift in how we looked at the web. Scraping and curating ODP was always a dead end and a pre-web paradigm.

- efficiency and computing horsepower had a lot to do with that - Lycos took months to update their index even when they were just an online Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. They probably couldn't even envision crawling, scraping, indexing and analyzing the entire web and being able to do so fast enough that the results still had meaning by the time they were done.

[Brad]

>jump

Spot on and good point. Also most search engines did not deep crawl like Google, they only indexed the page(s) submitted.  Those that did crawl didn't go very deep past the index page.  Okay, so Inktomi crawled deep but the relevance was terrible.

Looking back at it none of the search engines were any good and they didn't invest in improving their results much.

[ergophobe]

didn't invest in improving their results much.

I think that was one of the most interesting aspects of the article - that ultimately they were all run by the advertising departments which was fine as long as all your competitors did the same thing and the results sucked all around.

I remember at first everyone thinking google was cool, but stupid - how can you build a sustainable business with a blank homepage, a text input field and button? Ha! The author of the article, who already saw the value of text ads that looked like search results, must have seen DOOM written on the wall the second he saw Google.