41–50 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What search query tells you about the next scheduled episode of a TV show?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Big+Bang+Theory
Note to DDG - put the cool useful bit Under the place we all expect ads to be.
Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…
I remember why I switched to Google: 1. speed, 2. simplicity. Relevance, meh. Never noticed much difference there. This led me to believe that PageRank was more about marketing (brilliant marketing) than technical edge.
Are you kidding? I was using Altavista, IIRC, and would routinely have to page down to the second or third page to find any kind of relevant link. When I switched to Google, I almost immediately stopped looking at more than the first page of results.
What the article doesn't say is Inktomi had a dual sided business. One side was in Caching Proxies the other was licensing a search API.
Inktomi decided to focus on the caching proxy business and de-emphasized their search product, only to watch the proxy business evaporate as internet bandwidth became cheaper/better.
The focus on a shrinking market (proxies) and the lack of focus on growing market (search) killed them. Had search been a priority from the beginning things may have ended very differently with Inktomi creating their own front end.
Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…
When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.
In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. This is unrelated to the main point, but does anyone know if Yahoo re-used a significant amount of Inktomi tech acquired for that $250M? Or was it spoiled?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.
Do you think that would have affected their prospects for success?
- search is a commodity for licensing (making them resistant to launching a "cleaner" engine that would alienate their clients)
- what worked for a smaller internet (100 million pages) could scale appropriately with the growing internet (100 billion pages) without rethinking everything
- "Page rank" only helped relevance (it was also about spam)
I think Google is stuck in a rut of their own right now. Here's some faulty assumptions I think Google is making:
- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)
- users want Google to predict what they mean rather than clarify what they mean
- algorithms > human decisions
Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…
When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.
I was VP of Engineering at Altavista in 2000, and I started the project to move to Linux. It wasn't easy because search engineering was populated by Alpha fans who were unswayed by the 10x cost advantage.
As late as 2001, I sat in multiple focus groups where all the enterprise customers said Linux was not yet ready for the datacenter. IBM's penguin campaigns were just beginning at that time.
Google's large scale use of Linux was groundbreaking when they launched in 1998.