Beaten by Google

[Steve]

Cast your mind back to a time when a googol was just a really big number. Where did you go if you wanted to search for something on the all new, awe inspiring Intarweb? Searching was different then. Everybody had their own preference: Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot, or Excite. Then, along came a little thing called Google. Not the first search engine by any means, so why did it become so successful. Joe Kraus, founder of Excite, talks to the BBC about the lessons he learnt from Silicon Valley, and from Google.

Both Excite and Google are free to use; both business plans needed the support of advertisers.

But Excite took the conventional view that the ads would come from the top 100 companies in the USA, the people who buy huge amount of TV time and blanket the newspapers and the magazines.

Google did not go for the big spenders. Google's squads of PhDs wrote algorithms that would make it viable for the company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.

So lesson number two is about the new markets created by the internet, the ones making big profits for Google quarter by quarter.

How come the most successful companies have an idea that makes you say "why didn't I think of that?" The reason: the best ideas are relatively simple (OK, so Google's boffins had to write some clever code, but the idea of a mass of relevant ads is a simple one,) you've got to allow yourself to think beyond convention.

[mike_w]

You missed the best quote in the entire article by one paragraph!

The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people.

I think the reason Google is so popular/successful is just because it works. The other search engines never used to find good results so quickly. Also, it will be hard to beat now since it has become almost synonymous with using a search engine. When you look for something on the internet, you Google it.