It was a little over ten years now, and it is difficult to imagine the days before Google. But there were other search engines and Yahoo and asked Jeeves (still around, only now it’s just Ask.com) and Alta Vista in particular.

Even the mention of them brings to handle now walks five miles of snowy morning of summer. Google has become so dominant in the search of the Internet and I guess half or more of those using the Internet does not go there even is another choice. Google is so dominant that the name is used as a verb. Google is in danger of becoming generic, death registered trademark of Xerox and Kleenex combat shortly.

In fact, Google dominates not just search. He formed the Web: search, mapping, Javascript and XML interfaces (AJAX), even sophisticated models of mild page and names prepared with clumsy spelling unexpected.

In dead wood technology of the Internet, you would think that there is a new gun, who came to fight Google for the search. In fact, there are regular stories about the latest “Google killer” – recently, Wolfram | Alpha was mistakenly spread whatsoever. (Incorrectly because Wolfram is trying something different: The alpha is not a search engine, it is a calculation engine. See my review on Edgelings for details.) None of them did, and nothing competition oldest seems to any attempt to overcome the thread from Google. You must wonder why.

When I started thinking about this piece, I made an experiment. Google probably use a hundred times a day, so for a few days, I tried the same searches on other search engines. I could write a research report (you do not want), but anecdotally this is the result: when I tried researching the various different search engines, they have one of two things – or they have delivered exactly the same results in almost the same as Google, or what they were delivered in a wildly inaccurate.

The oldsters should think again in the early days of Google. Remember when it was first introduced in beta (the model to announce a “public beta” of a product that continues for months or years is another innovation from Google, come to think of it), with super-simple interface and two buttons: “search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky.” That was not the first research site by any means – which is how Yahoo has begun, after all – but he had the magic property that if you introduce a keyboard, it really showed you something you desired. You might even beat me “you feel lucky” and, by golly, many times Google provides something close to what you wanted. On other search engines, you have a group of links, and somewhere, perhaps the third or fourth page you will find something useful.

Google has quickly dominated the search because he was better he did what you wanted. Google continues to dominate the search space, I suspect, because it is even better, or at least because it is not worse.

Meanwhile, Google has made another interesting thing. They noted that to run the Search Engine, they have needed immense computer power, storage and much more immense, and because they had to follow the growth of the Internet that they have sought, they have always had to add more, meaning that there is always capacity available. Thus, rather than make a massive investment to become a portal, as companies like MSN and Yahoo did, they have their massive infrastructure on research – and then noted they could become a portal to almost no incremental cost. They dominate completely free email, portal content, application programs, real time, and so forth? Maybe, maybe not – but they did cost almost absolutely zero.

This, I think, am the answer to the question why Google? “They started with a good idea, and have learned to earn money from it. They continue to earn money from it because nobody else can really do – significantly – better. Other things they do, portals and Find Google and so on, they can do for free because, in effect, at the margin, they are free.

Killer Google, if and when it comes, will have the same properties: it should really be significantly better than Google and must have a way to earn money while being better, and he must find a way to do so while giving away the obvious.

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