The Search
In this episode of Internet Origins, we explore The Search by John Battelle—the story of how Google transformed the chaos of the early web into order. From Stanford dorm rooms to Silicon Valley boardrooms, Larry Page and Sergey Brin reimagined how information could be found and ranked.
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00:07 - 00:33 Before Google, searching the internet was an act of faith. You'd type words into AltaVista or InfoSeek, then click search and hope that somewhere in the hundreds of irrelevant results was the thing you actually wanted. Most of the time, it wasn't. By 1998, search engines had become so polluted with spam and so poor at understanding relevance that most people had given up on them entirely.
00:33 - 01:04 especially internet giants like Yahoo and AOL, who were busy building portals, digital kingdoms designed to keep users inside their walls. Portals were the opposite of search engines. Instead of sending you out to find information across the web, they brought everything to you. Email and weather, stock quotes, chat rooms, and horoscopes, Because the business model at the time was based on banner ads, the goal was stickiness.
01:04 - 01:19 Making search no more than a necessary evil. Sending users away from the portal and the ads within. Yet in the search logs of these broken engines lay something extraordinary. A database of intentions.