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Some of the first search engines companies were Yahoo and Excite.
Today’s search engines return pages of information in less than a third of a second.
The web was once page after page of plain text, long lists of underlined sentences
where you could only follow links.
Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo founded the company Yahoo.
1994 - Yahoo was just a directory, a list of categories and sub-categories that you could
hunt and peck around it, created manually.
Sequoia Capital was the venture capital company that funded Yahoo.
It wasn’t until the mid-1990’s that commerce was allowed on the Internet, to be able to
buy and sell.
Yahoo was very concerned about the ramifications of putting advertising on their web
site, that the users would rebel.
Advertising meant that it was possible to make money on the Internet, and the Web
Boom had begun.
Yahoo’s biggest rival was a company called Excite whose search engine used a more
sophisticated technology. (Remember those guys from Triumph of the Nerds?)
Excite had a search engine that when you typed in your query it would crawl the web to
find the web pages. Yahoo and other companies quickly followed suit.
Search companies began to focus on other features like personalization and email, and
losing site on searching.
The founders of Google were Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Google is a twist on the word googol, 10 to the hundredth power (1 followed by 100
zeroes).
Google prioritizes its lists like a popularity contest, using the number of links to that
page from other pages, a form of link counting.
Google was a search engine that cared about search again.
Venture capitalist and cofounder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla tried to get Excite
to buy or license the Google technology, so Excite could win the search battle against
their rival Yahoo.
Although Excite could have bought Google for about $1 million, Excite was not
interested. Excite is worth over $100 billion today.
Stanford Professor David Cheriton introduced them to investors Andy Bechtolsheim and
John Doerr helped fund Google.
Google did not use banner ads to fund their company like Yahoo and Excite, they
wanted their advertisements to make more sense.
Google used Bill Gross’s idea at Overture.com to use keywords that could be sold to
advertisers who would pay for placement like the Yellow Pages.
Google separates the unpaid results from the paid results.
Google’s motto is don’t be evil.
There are concerns regarding privacy of personal information.