Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013, when Google was celebrating its 15th anniversary. The remark that Go.com now only leads to a page of Walt Disney Company products describes the site as it was in 2013.
It was 1998, and the leading search portal was Yahoo, while plenty of other search engines were trying to compete with it, among them Excite and Lycos, Netscape’s Netcenter, AOL.com and MSN.com. The latest company to try its luck in the search business was none other than Disney, which created its own search engine, Go.com (today that address only leads to a page of Walt Disney Company products).
As Google celebrates 15 years as a company, Business Insider has dug up the first article ever written about a small Silicon Valley startup called Google that wanted to break into the search business.
Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg had been ranting about the new search engines trying to emerge, as well as the existing ones. But on 21 December 1998 he changed his tune when writing about a new company called Google. He explained that two young Stanford students had built a search engine using a mathematical algorithm (the famous PageRank) that solved one of the problems of the search engines of the day: on many of them, if you typed “President Clinton”, you weren’t taken to the official White House site but to any page that talked about Clinton, or even to a page about a trip to Washington. The article was titled “Yes, there is a better search engine“.
The author foresaw a serious threat to Yahoo, MSN and AOL if they didn’t change, because after trying Google he realised it worked much better than the rest, even though the two young entrepreneurs had only been working on the project for three months. Even so, they already had more than 60 million pages indexed and well ranked.
Back then, however, everyone kept saying that search engines weren’t a good business, because it was hard to find a way to make money from them. Nobody expected that Google (a company that tried to sell its search engine and never found a buyer) would find a way to generate huge revenues with Google AdWords and Google AdSense, its programmes for advertisers and publishers.
Google wasn’t the first, but it did it best, while the other companies, which already held leading positions, grew complacent. By the time they realised the threat a newcomer posed to their business, the “virus” had already spread, and it didn’t take Google long to become the world leader in internet search.
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Featured image: Erik Pitti, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
