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November 08, 2003
IL Con-Grunting: Rich Wiggins on "Why Google Won"
The sad news was Gary Price couldn't make it to IL 2003, due to a hospitalization (he won't miss his gall bladder, and he's feeling much better).
The good news was his replacement, Rich Wiggins, gave a boffo talk. I can't replicate the whole talk, of course--Wiggins is his own dynamic universe--but here are some gems; not all revelations, but all worth repeating.
In 2002, Google overtook Yahoo in referrals to Web sites
How did google establish dominance? Link analysis was a wise emphasis
Versus Yahoo, a limited directory
(Aside: there's a librarian named Needles at the Haystack Observatory)
People don't repeat searches
People don't climb through hit lists Just let them type the words in and find what they're looking for at thetop of the list.
Read "The Google Effect" by Dan Gilmore
Every search engine performs special pre-search algorithms; some are more visible than others.
Google's home page is spare, minimalist, unclutttered
References Krug, "Don't Make Me Think" (one of my favorite usability guides)
Google has had this unwavering belief in search; news.google.com is fully robotic
Google "resisted the temptation to belong to other nations" (To quote Gilbert and Sullivan)
Google put in reverse phone book
effective scaling
google rebuilds the index from scratch every 30 days
Google has nimbleness
They are running linux on commodity servers
Could a contender overtake google? Microsoft vs Google: kill or buy
Posted by kgs at November 8, 2003 08:21 AM
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