Why Yahoo Lost and Google Won.
In this article from Forbes Magazine, Gil Press attributes Google’s immense success as a search engine and web pioneer to the company’s achievement in designing the Web the way Tim Berners-Lee invented it to be. Google did much more than simply “organize” the world’s information. Press writes, “Google’s founders were the first to seize on Berners-Lee’s insight and build their information retrieval business on tracking closely cross-references (i.e., links between pages) as they were happening and correlate relevance with quantity of cross-references (i.e., popularity of pages as judged by how many other pages linked to them).” Google is therefore able to provide users with the smartest and most relevant search results, completely outperforming competitors.
When we first introduced the structure of the Internet in class, Professor Kleinburg explained that the core purpose of this profoundly complex network of information is to make data more accessible and available to the public. When facing the new challenges that arise from both the scarcity and abundance of information on the web, one wonders what is the most efficient way to find the “best” answer. Surely, classical techniques of information retrieval no longer apply to a library at such a scale like this.
In Danny Sullivan’s article from 2010, which Press directly quotes in his piece, Sullivan argues that, “Google’s ranking system gave you the best of both worlds. Yahoo was a card-catalog of the web, letting you effectively search for the right “books” based on what they were titled. Google’s system let you search through all the pages of all the books in the entire library.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/07/26/why-yahoo-lost-and-google-won/#2408ba05e155