You are writing a review on Mouthshut and can’t remember the name of that hot actress or the handsome actor... You are writing a review on top 10 movies of Big B, but finding it difficult to cross 8... Do you pray to God or do you Google?
In the beginning there was darkness...
During the dark ages of the beginning of the internet age, the only way you could get information from the web was to collect the URLs ( internet addresses starting with https://) from friends, from books, magazines etc. Visit the web-sites, if found useful add them to your Favorites (in IE) so that you could visit them later when required.
If you were unlucky & don’t have the right URL, the very urgent information was simply out of your reach. People hardly accessed 5% of the Web.
Then came the Search Engines
Then someone came up with a brilliant idea. Why not have a ’Yellow Pages’ on the internet which people could use to find web-site addresses?
Now how can information be arranged in this Yellow Pages? By URLs when most people would be using this to find URLs where they could find info without requiring to know the URLs? By popular topics? This looked a better Idea... let us arrange URLS under topics say Fashion, Entertainment, Education etc. then have sub-topics/ sub-sub-topics under each main topic like Entertainment --> Movies --> Hollywood Movies --> Current --> X2.
OK, the information is now arranged hierarchically & better organized. But if one someone just wanted to know about ’X2’, he/she should still click on Entertainment-->Movies--> Hollywood Movies --> Current and then look for X2 (Yawn)... If the topic was 16 levels deep. Who wants to click 15 times??!!
On the sixth day Internet created the ’Search Engines’. Now you could just type ’X2’ into the search box & click on ’Search’/’Go’ and lo... X2 appears in your browser just like magic.
Google wasn’t the first one to appear on the scene. There was a time when Yahoo! powered by Inkotomi was the most popular Search engine on the Net.
Finally there was a Saviour
When people were having heated discussion on which was the best search engine? Yahoo? Alta-vista? Northern-light? Web-crawler? etc. etc. Suddenly there appeared a Messiah on the cyber horizons who gave the Netizens the final deliverance from Cyber Ignorance. Google the Great
What gave this behemoth such speed? A KISS... not the one that was given by a beautiful princess, but ’Keep It Simple Stupid’. Look carefully at Google. How many multi-megabyte JPG/JPEGs, Flash Animations etc.do you find? NONE
Let us say I search for ’’Goosfraba’’ on Yahoo (Inkotomi) and on Google. For argument sake let us assume Inkotomi & Google took same time to retrieve the search results. But is that what I would feel? NO
There are 2 components in the response of a search Engine 1) search speed + 2) the time taken to draw the web-page. Now who scores here. Google wins Hands down!! while my IE window searching Yahoo! takes it’s own sweet time to draw all the fancy Images, Flash Ads etc. etc. the light-weight Google page appears in a flash in my browser like a burning bush!!
Even for a simple search we see have to access the web-site two times. First time to see the life-saving ’Search’ box & then the first page of the search-results. Now let us say I find relevant web-site on the history of ’Goosfraba’ on the 5th page, What would I say? Yahoo! sucks ^$%&( ( 1+5 = 6 x delay) & Google Rulez!!
Then came the Cyber-serpents
With the rising popularity of ’Search Engines’ there appeared a new breed of cyber-conmen called ’Search Engine consultants’. They promised the customers (web-sites) higher page-rankings if they used their services. The trick employed by them is to to exploit the ’Invisible’ parts of the web page to fool the ’Spiders’. These invisible portions never get seen by a net-surfer but only by the ’Spiders’ A ’Spider’ equivalent of Spamming!!
When other Search engines fell for this cyber temptation, one after another... returning unrelevant pages in bulk to Netizens, Google was the only knight in shining armour who stood his ground. The Last Search Engine Standing
Then the Temptation took over
Now a lot of money goes into maintaining the kind of infrastructure ( hardware, clustering, maintenance, administration, development etc.) needed to run a web-site like Google’s size & volume. Where does Google get this kind of money? Considering they don’t carry that many Advertisements?
The initial model was to provide Searching capabilities to portals like Yahoo! (even IndiaTimes), other web-sites, web-based tools etc. Any web-site which wanted a search capability for it’s huge web-site, but lacked the money/infrastructure to build a home-grown solution would pay Google to provide the ’Search’ feature for their portal/web-site.
So far so good. Then came the Dot.Gone days with Dot-coms going bust one after another & portals started collapsing one after another like a pack of cards.
The only way ’Google’ could survive is to cash-in on the very ’Search’ capability that made it the Web-wide popular name. If you are a merchant web-site & you could get your web-site in the top 5-10 of Google Search for the products you sell. Just imagine the number of potential customers that would be visiting your web-site!!. Why pay the ’Search Engine consultants’ and see you money go down the drain (unable o fool the Google Robots) when you could just pay Google itself to get your web-site a higher page-ranking!!
Unethical? Immoral? But then a totally FREE meal is as mythical as ’Santa Claus’ in these difficult times.
The Lost Cause
Google is trying to pull a ’Mission Impossible’ in these ’End of Dot-com days’!! The creation of ’Froogle’ (in very frugal Beta stage) service to tap the product/price search market, Google News to compete with Yahoo! news & other newer services. Google even has been buying other web-sites like Blogger.com ( a popular blogging/web-logging site).
This brought then into direct clash of interests/competition with their main customer Yahoo!. The rift has reached the point of no return with Yahoo! turning back to Inkotomi for providing ’Search’ capability to it’s portal. Yahoo! has launched a ’New Search’ which is deceptively similar to Google!! ( No Ads & light-weight like Google)
The portals are a lost cause in these times of economic down-turn especially for new-comers like Google (on the portal scene), with behemoths like Yahoo!, MSn having captured most of the cyber-market. Google cannot compete with them without providing services like Free E-mail, Address Book, Calendar, Chat, Instant Messenger, E-groups etc. etc. Where will Google raise the funding required to build such an infrastructure??!! May be it would have been better to have continued as an Yahoo! affiliate/partner?
Google is Google
All said and done, there still isn’t any Search Engine who could compete with & beat Google in the ’Search’ game. Add to it the fact that ’Google=Search’ branding which has become permanently etched in the minds of most Netizens like ’E-mail=Hotmail’. With so many of us flaunting ’Google Tool Bar’ in our Internet Explorer, Google is here to stay & rule in the near foreseeable future
So let us...Hail Google