Back when the internet was a relatively new concept and fairly difficult to use Google was the first search engine that was user friendly.

It was pretty much the first search engine that works really well. And that allowed them to be the first thing everyone has in mind when they want to search something, to the point where it became it's own word (to google something).

People who are less tech literate possibly don't even know alternatives exist.

So it's basically early bird bonus

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What’s the solution!!??

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I don’t know what you are saying, but it sounds offensive! I apologize for asking.

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Another key but historically overlooked thing about Google search was that the search page was blank with just a search box.

Why was this important? Back in the day all search engines has masses of ads and articles on their search page.

This was a particular problem in the days of dial up. People had to wait tens of seconds for a search page to load up all the shit you weren't interested in, before you could enter your search query.

By having an almost blank search page, Google became synonymous with easy accessibility and a clean search experience.

Together with better search algorithms, this clean approach was a winner.

can you name an example which you find to be better than Google?

I use duckduckgo for privacy reasons, but the results are always less accurate and useful than googles results in my opinion.

A transition matrix is a big table that measures how connected pages are with other pages. One of Google's co-founders, Larry Page, wrote his thesis on performing specific math on these matrices that rank how well connected they are with other things that are connected well, this method is called Page rank, not because it ranks webpages, but because Larry Page invented it.

There's not really a way to describe the specifics of how Page rank work without knowing some linear algebra. You're looking for a "solution" to the matrix called its eigenvalues and eigenvectors, which is a Linear Algebra concept I can't quite eli5

While at main google campus once, about 2005, there was a screen of the globe emitting a dot, rising up from the surface of its geo location, and fading up in to space, every time another dot appeared behind it. Each dot represented some 1000 or so ad clicks (must compress to visualize). If you have any exposure to digital advertising/paid search, you know what clicks cost. Anywhere from .01 to many many dollars. Each one. The entire globe was glowing luminously from the millions of dots - clicks - per second, continuously in near real time. This visualization of google’s ad revenue thus income was easily translated, with a little imagination, to a pipe, with approximate diameter of two average size US states, pumping money in to google’s accounts at millions of dollars a minute if not seconds. 24/7 365. Trying to comprehend its revenues is like trying to comprehend all sand, all stars, or all living cells. It’s practically impossible for a normal human mind. Their search rank algo running against their own index (storage) of all websites got the most eyeballs soonest. And they have kept ahead of competition across a broad array of verticals by every means possible—buying and building themselves in to every (digital) aspect of our lives. All platforms are ad pushers. But no other has the breadth and reach of The Goog. And ads are of course just one rev $tream in a very diverse portfolio.

There are a lot of old search engines that don't exist anymore. Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Lycos etc. Most didn't survive the dotcom crash around 2000. Yahoo is still around though. It was the dominant search engine at mid 1990s, but their page was more cluttered (it was simpler than the current page though).

Initially? Because it was noticeably better than the alternatives.

Subsequently? Being good enough + inertia + questionable (possibly illegal) behavior that further cemented its position and/or limited potential rivals.

So much this. I remember the time. Most search engines were self-declared "portals" cluttered with all kinds of stuff and search was just one feature among many. Most of this other stuff no one wanted or needed, but the search engines insisted on it, whether because it was making them money or they saw it as added value or the designer though a mostly empty page looked dumb or the managers were bored by their own core functionality...

Whereas google did just search, did it well, and did it fast.

They did the right thing at the right time. When it was first launch, it solved a problem: How could an average user find things on the internet in an easy, non threatening way?

Pre Google, search engines were designed with horrible UI's, plastered with ads, pop ups, and they didn't return very relevant results. Seriously, I was a heavy internet user in those days and the search engines out there were TERRIBLE. It was just understood that to find what you wanted, you had to use at least 3-5 searches on multiple different search engine. There was even a search engine that search other search engines (Metacrawler) to try and make this easier. It made using the internet a frustrating, non useful experience for novices.

Then along comes Google. A clean, blank screen with a logo and search bar. That was it. You typed what you wanted, and got the result you were looking for. It was simple, non frightening, and it worked. For the first time your grandmother could figure out how to search the internet all on her own. It simply dominated every other search engine in terms of usability and functionality, and they all vanished into obscurity shortly after.

This was all happening at the time the internet was really hitting the mainstream, so it just became part of the lexicon, to get information on the internet became "to Google it", and once somehting enters the lexicon like that, it's nearly impossible to dislodge

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And now, both kids have been using Chromebooks since 1st grade, they log into their google accounts, all schoolwork, homework and assignments are on Google..by all means it's WAY better then before in terms of efficiency, but Google must have a vast database on an entire generation since they are 6yo

>eigenvalues and eigenvectors, which is a Linear Algebra concept I can't quite eli5

eigenvectors are just certain vectors that when multiplied by the matrix, still point in the same direction. Aû = û.

eigenvalue is how much that vector gets stretched by. Au = eu.

so it could very crudely be summed up by saying "if you keep following links over and over, where do you likely end up"

Many comments talk about what made google good to begin with (page rank, clean ui), but less about why it's still dominant. There are a few factors there, but the big ones seem to be company culture, scale and data.

By company culture I mean google is a very engineering focused company. They built their own everything and mainly better than anyone else. They built serialization libraries, their own server hardware and data centers, their own code repository and testing infrastructure, etc. All code must be reviewed to be used, and instead of blaming people for bugs they do post mortems and fix the underlying problems. They put everything in one giant repo so that anyone can see anyone else's code so they can fix it or reuse it. It's quite easy to just go fix something without asking your manager for permission. All this let them attract and keep great talent to keep improving things at a rate and efficiency that few other companies can keep up with. There are a few other companies that do this well, but few as well as google.

By scale and data I mean there's a rich get richer dynamic in many online businesses, including many that google is in, including search and ads. If you came up with some great idea for a search engine, could you actually take on Google? You could code it up, but could you download the entire public internet to start serving users? Could you run tests of the various tweaks to your idea are an improvement or not? There are only a handful of companies that have the scale needed to even try, and they're apparently not sure they'll succeed without some good reason (eg apple maps has a chance mainly due to the iPhone).

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Exactly, I think they were trying to cling to the aol model of their site being "the internet". Why would you need to search something when they had news, weather, email, chat etc etc.

It had the best algorithm (pagerank), it focussed on the search results returning quickly and without visual clutter, and the cost of migrating to a new search engine for users is virtually zero.

I think the competition achieved it...

At the time google got dominant, it was the only one with good results. There wa nothing else remotly usefull...

They take every byte they that home page very seriously. Literally every byte.

For a page getting a few million hits every second, every byte matters.

It had a clean user interface, especially compared to the others at the time. Early on it published a series of shortcut commands some of us still use. If you type define:[someword] it will return a definition. You can also pass common scripts and even mathematics to it and it will return what you expect. That is a really handy tool and nerds loved it.

What really sealed the deal, though, was its purchases of YouTube and DoubleClick. With ad information and being the defacto search engine for internet videos gave Google the behemoth status it has today.

I forgot about Keyhole, that was a big deal too. With that acquisition they became the default search engine for geographic data.

My go-to analogy for page-rank is using social media.

If you're looking for people to follow, which account would you likely choose someone that has millions of followers versus an account with 3?

What there were 100 people, all with over 1 million of followers and most of them followed 1 account? Surely that 1 account must be a high quality account, because popular/important accounts follow it.

Let's say Black Mirror Bandersnatch?

Compared to the "search engines " in the early 00's. The Google search engine was at least 1000 times better. My job at the time was to solve problems that users had using an ISP. GOOGLE was in all ways really so much better . Especially the first few results were almost always what you were hoping to find. I can remember my co workers teasing me about using Google. Then within days everyone was using Google.
A typical end user at the time had a web browser with "toolbars " The toolbars conflicted with the other toolbars, conflicted with the computers software ( operating system) and the security software. This resulted in a computer that took up to 20 minutes to turn on ( boot up) and very sluggish performance ( 100% cpu utilization for minutes).

Google was the first search engine to associate search terms with pages by using the link text from the upstream end of a link.

Before that pages were asked to categorize themselves by adding metadata to the HTML source of the page. The title, the headings within the body, and metadata tags in the head were used to categorize for Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. Google came along and put precedence on the link text. For example in this link: the funniest thing in existence, Google would associate that webpage with the word "funniest" in its search.

By relying on external "categorizations" that relied on the natural English that others used to describe what a link was pointing to, Google was able to tap into a distributed intelligence that associated words with web pages that more closely resembled how a searcher would think of the page.

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Google took the loss in ad revenue early on.