For some queries, newbie search engines are better
An aeon ago, we all searched the Web with Yahoo, Excite, Altavista and others. The results, helpful at first, deteriorated over time. If a user searched for, say, “Viagra”, search engines decided that the best results were pages that contained the word “Viagra” as many times as possible. Naturally, spammers created pages stuffed with fake keywords to lure in the innocent. And results became increasingly crowded with unwanted stuff.
Along came Google with a revolutionary thought: Relevance, or links from other Web sites as an indicator of importance. So if the most number of pages on the Internet pointed to Pfizer’s (Viagra’s manufacturer) site, that was probably the most authoritative one. Google called its algorithm “PageRank”. Its results were so good that its market share grew exponentially year after year. Today, seven out of ten searches are via Google. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary list “googling” as a verb.
(This story appears in the 03 July, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)