

Theoretically, the most useful result would be at the top of the first page of results. As in Larry Page but also as in ranking your search results by page. In 1996 - when they were grad students at Stanford - they created a search engine built upon a clever algorithm called PageRank. Sergey Brin and Larry Page thought they could do better. A search query produced a long list of sites, in seemingly random order, and you would have to page through hundreds or thousands of links to find what you needed. But they weren’t great at figuring out which of those pages you’d actually want to see. Infoseek and other search engines were okay at crawling the web and finding pages that contained the words you searched for. It took me a while to convince myself I wasn’t going to miss out on anything by not doing the search on Infoseek. And so when I even started working at Google, for about the first month, I would do every search on both. I just felt like it really helped me on my papers. MAYER: I was very attached to a search engine called Infoseek. She was the 20 th employee at Google, and their first female engineer she joined right after getting her master’s degree from Stanford in computer science. of Yahoo! And before that, she worked at Google, for 13 years. There was one called Dogpile that was actually a metasearch and hit many of the other searches. MAYER: There was AltaVista, there was one called AlltheWeb or Fast that was working out of Norway. And someone said, “let there be search,” and behold, there was search. In the beginning, computer scientists created the world wide web, and the web was without form, and void darkness was upon the face of the Internet.
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Is Google getting worse? Or is it just that - as Milton Friedman might have said - there ain’t no such thing as a free search? Liz REID: If I took Google away, you would go nuts. Jeremy STOPPELMAN: The problem with monopoly power is that you can degrade the experience because you’ve locked in that user.Īnd we will hear Google’s defense - or is it more of a threat? What happened when Google essentially became a monopoly? Marissa MAYER: People would be like, “Your search engine is so good and you’re not making any money, and we just wanted to pay you.” Do you also feel like Google isn’t what it used to be? Today on Freakonomics Radio: how did Google come to dominate web search in the first place? I feel like I’m seeing more ads, more links that might as well be ads, more links to spammy web pages. My search results just don’t seem as useful. But today? To me, at least, it doesn’t feel the same. When you needed some information, you just typed a few words into the search box and, very quickly, you got the answer you were looking for, usually from an authoritative source. The power of that revelation faded, as revelations do, and we all began to take Google for granted. McDEVITT: Google was a revelation because it made this information accessible, and it was so useful. That is Ryan McDevitt he’s an economist at Duke. Ryan McDEVITT: I’m old enough to remember before Google, and it was really hard to find anything on the Internet. Do you remember when using Google to search for something online felt like magic?
