How the World Got Wired · Search

Better Than Anything Else

You need to remember, to understand why Google was such a shock, what searching the web was like in 1997.

There were several search engines available. They had names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo!. They all worked, roughly, by the same logic: when you typed in a word, they showed you a list of every web page that had that word on it, ordered by some combination of how often the word appeared and how recently the page had been updated. The lists were long. The first page of results was usually full of pages that had simply used the word a lot, often deliberately, to fool the search engines. People who wanted to game the system would write hidden text on their pages, repeating popular keywords thousands of times, to push themselves to the top.

The result was that searching the web in 1997 was usually a frustrating, slow experience. You typed in something. You got a list of fifty or a hundred pages that mostly didn’t have anything to do with what you actually wanted. You clicked on the first few, hoped one of them would be useful, gave up, tried a different search. Most people, when they wanted to find something specific, did not search. They went to a place like Yahoo!, which was not really a search engine but a hand-maintained directory of websites organized into categories — Sports, News, Travel, Music — and clicked through the categories.

When Page and Brin’s search engine came online at Stanford in 1997 — running on machines borrowed from various Stanford labs, paid for by federal research grants — people started using it, and they started telling other people to use it. The reason was simple. When you typed in a search, the first result was usually the page you wanted. Not the fifth. Not the twentieth. The first.

The students at Stanford started using it constantly. Word spread to other universities. By early 1998, Page and Brin were getting more than ten thousand queries a day. They had to keep finding more Stanford computers to plug into their system, because they kept running out of room.

It was clear they had something important. The question was what to do with it.

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