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shminux comments on How much was creating Google worth? - Less Wrong
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I doubt it. There were search engines before and after, none ever came close. Google and now Amazon have been creating far more wealth than a simple calculation may suggest.
When I switched to Google, the improvement over Yahoo felt modest (for the searches I was making). Barely enough to change my bookmarks.
I found the difference remarkable and spectacular.
Did the two of you switch at different times? (If so, that might give some information about how long it would have taken for someone else to improve as much as Google did -- though they might have improved slower with less competitive pressure.)
I started using Google in early 1999, when it still had "Stanford search" on the front.
At one point, Yahoo was actually using Google to create its searchable index.
When did you switch? (See my reply to David_Gerard for why I'm asking.)
Hmm. I'm pretty sure it was late 1999.
I think it's more likely that my searches were either really easy or nearly impossible, so the difference in performance didn't stand out.
Oh well. Another beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact. So it goes.
Do you think no one else could invent PageRank?
I'm not sure myself, but the general PageRank algorithm (the method of adjacency matrix eigenvectors for determining critical nodes) had been around since the 60s, but hadn't been properly mapped to the site ranking problem until them (which is not a trivial problem at self, at least at the stage of recognizing the relevance).
Supposedly PageRank isn't even very important anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.
But "after" Google developed dominant position and everyone started using it, and working for them. How long do you think that the lag would have been?