Happy Birthday
Yesterday, Google had its 5th anniversary. From a garage with roughly 10.000 hits a day, to a growing enterprise with 200 million queries a day. Quite a feat, you might say, but my analysis is somewhat simpler:
Speed and accuracy – in a time where all the big search engines took tens of seconds to return some shaky results, Google was fast and reliable.
Marketing – A very useful toolbar came standard with the earliest version of Opera. A toolbar for Internet Explorer was easy to download and use as well. Big sites (like CNN) feature a “powered by Google” search button.
And last but not least, the name – “Can you altavista this and that for me ?” doesn’t sound quite as catchy, does it ?
(also, use the statistics link above this article to see google is really the best)