zlacker

Oh, the pagerank myth.

Google won against initially Alta Vista, because they had so much money to buy themselves into each countries interxion to produce faster results. With servers and cheap disks.

The pagerank and more bots approach kept them in front afterwards, until a few years ago when search went downhill due to SEO hacks in this monoculture.

>>rurban+(OP)
This is anegdotical evidence, but I was there when Google came out and it was simply much better than the competition. I learned one day about this new websitr - and it was so much better than the other alternatives that I never went back. Same with gmail, trying to get that invite for that sweet 1GB mailbox when the ones from your country offered only 20MB and sent you 10 spammy ads per day, every day.

As an anegdote: before google I was asked to show the internet to my grandmother. So I asked her what she wants to search for. She asked me about some author, let's say William Shakespeare - guess what did the other search engine find for me and my grandma: porn...

>>rvba+Xi
I don't remember response speed mattered until at least ten years after Google's start.

Certainly not when they won.

They were better. Basic PageRank was better than anything else. And once they figured out advertisement, they kept making it better to seal their dominance.

>>rurban+(OP)
Google gave better results. Few people cared about faster servers at the time, not when most of the world was still on dialup or ADSL.