Google
Web Search
McCracken’s Eleventh Law of Technology Innovation famously states that anything that’s ever been invented would have been eventually invented even if the person or persons who invented it had never been born. If Thomas Edison hadn’t come up with the light bulb and phonograph, for instance, we wouldn’t be without ‘em in 2008–somebody else would have invented in due time.
And as revolutionary as Google’s PageRank algorithm was when it debuted, it was, in retrospect, an obvious idea: A Web site that has lots of links from other sites is more likely to be good, and should therefore rank higher in search results. I can’t imagine that this notion would have simply never existed if Brin and Page hadn’t originated it in the form of BackRub, Google’s predecessor. Someone else would have come up with it, and would likely have blown away AltaVista and other early search engines in accuracy, just as Google did.
Google’s original home page was almost as revolutionary as PageRank, simply because it was…simple. Not much more than a logo, a text field, a Search button, and and I’m Feeling Lucky one. It was a major part of why Google took off originally, and while nearly every major search engine ended up shamlessly copying it,
I think it’s possible that nobody else would have been daring enough to try it.
Once Google had been successful with Web search, it was obsessive about building everything it did around search: If there’s a Google product or service in which a search field is not core to the functionality and prominent in the user interface, I’m not thinking of it now. Countless other companies have bought into the notion that search is the Internet’s defining tool; nobody else has riffed on the idea as effectively as Google.
So the bottom line on Web search is this: If Google hadn’t existed, we surely wouldn’t have gotten something exactly like Google in its place. And maybe not something as good. But search would surely have evolved just as radically,
McCracken’s Eleventh Law of Technology Innovation famously states that anything that’s ever been invented would have been eventually invented even if the person or persons who invented it had never been born. If Thomas Edison hadn’t come up with the light bulb and phonograph, for instance, we wouldn’t be without ‘em in 2008–somebody else would have invented in due time.
And as revolutionary as Google’s PageRank algorithm was when it debuted, it was, in retrospect, an obvious idea: A Web site that has lots of links from other sites is more likely to be good, and should therefore rank higher in search results. I can’t imagine that this notion would have simply never existed if Brin and Page hadn’t originated it in the form of BackRub, Google’s predecessor. Someone else would have come up with it, and would likely have blown away AltaVista and other early search engines in accuracy, just as Google did.
Google’s original home page was almost as revolutionary as PageRank, simply because it was…simple. Not much more than a logo, a text field, a Search button, and and I’m Feeling Lucky one. It was a major part of why Google took off originally, and while nearly every major search engine ended up shamlessly copying it,
I think it’s possible that nobody else would have been daring enough to try it.
Once Google had been successful with Web search, it was obsessive about building everything it did around search: If there’s a Google product or service in which a search field is not core to the functionality and prominent in the user interface, I’m not thinking of it now. Countless other companies have bought into the notion that search is the Internet’s defining tool; nobody else has riffed on the idea as effectively as Google.
So the bottom line on Web search is this: If Google hadn’t existed, we surely wouldn’t have gotten something exactly like Google in its place. And maybe not something as good. But search would surely have evolved just as radically,