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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#62After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.
None of their competitors realized how much money Google was making from search until it was too late.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#63It was clear that Yahoo.com was the definitive result for the query "yahoo" so it would score a 10. Other Yahoo pages would be ok (perhaps a 5 or 6). Irrelevant pages stuffed with Yahoo-related keywords would be spam.
As someone who worked on search quality at Google for some time, this bit jumped out at me as a terrible mistake. The correct way to judge results for the query [yahoo] is:
(a) Where is yahoo.com? At the top?
(b) There is no (b).
It seems like a slight difference, but it leads to the wrong priorities. For the query [yahoo], it does not matter if spam or non-spam is in spot #5. The only thing that matters is where you put yahoo.com.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it. Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)
Its not that Google's page is completely cluttered now. I remember using web portals at that time to search the web and then Google. The difference was day and night. Portals were that bad.
I was amazed -- even at the time -- that anyone thought this (http://web.archive.org/web/20000229120749/http://www.altavis...) was a good idea.
I'm really glad UX thinking has progressed.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#65That was a good read. I remember I used Yahoo for searching the web. Due to relevancy factor I moved to Altavista (but it didn't improve anything until the day I found out about Google and still use Google). I didn't know that Inktomi was powering search at that time. If Yahoo was so dependent on Inktomi or Google for its Search, I wonder why didn't they work on Search by themselves. After all they were information o…
Yahoo owned Overture so their results were pure pay-for-placement. If anyone wanted to pay $100 per click to have the #1 spot on "beef" go to a site about chicken, that was a-OK with Yahoo management. When Yahoo realized their auction system was stupid, they had "project Panama" which was also a joke and by that time Google had the market to themselves anyway.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#66Earlier 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
Pretty depressing. At least on Google there is a top-10 result for the actual big bang theory, instead of irrelevant pop culture garbage.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#67After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.
AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did. AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.
An isn't yahoo search now powered by bing? Tough game search these days when the no. 2 search engine is highly unprofitable.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Big+Bang+Theory
Pretty depressing. At least on Google there is a top-10 result for the actual big bang theory, instead of irrelevant pop culture garbage.
I think most people refer to the beginning of the universe simply as the "big bang", which produces the results you'd expect.
(Whatever you do, don't search for The Postal Service.)
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#69Inktomi killed Inktomi long before Google helped put the nail in the coffin. 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 shrinkin…
I was going to mention this. It seemed like the management at Inktomi let it fall once the engineers started using Google search engines. Their response is a likely bellweather of the attitude of the time.
Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
#70Great 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…
Close. Lots of other companies were also hiring pretty high tier talent as well, and had intense focus. Google's success came down to effectively executing across typically disparate disciplines. You have hard core research level CS eggheads, you have top tier software engineers, and you have state of the art data center operations. In a typical organization these groups have competing interests, they fight amongst t…
Excellent point.
From the article: "In short, Google had realized that a search engine wasn't about finding ten links for you to click on. It was about satisfying a need for information. For us engineers who spent our day thinking about search, this was obvious. Unfortunately, we were unable to sell this to our executives. Doug built a clutter-free UI for internal use, but our execs didn't want to build a destination search engine to compete with our customers. I still have an email in which I outlined a proposal to build a snippets and caching cluster, which was nixed because of costs."
The engineers here had more than inkling what needed to be done. The problem was this didn't go through the entire company.