Google is undoubtedly the reigning search champion with over 90 percent of the search market share as of January 2019. Google search accounts for 68% of the search market share, while other Google platforms such as YouTube and Google Maps account for 22% totaling to 90%.
The giant search engine processes approximately 3 billion searches per day with 63,000 searches every second. Google is also one of the world’s most valuable companies with revenue amounting to $36.34 billion in the first quarter of 2019 and $136.22 billion in the year 2018.
Although Google is now an industry giant and a household name around the world, the company evolved from humble beginnings. The industry giant was the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2 Stanford graduate students who developed Google as part of their Ph.D. thesis. The two graduated actually developed the famous search engine in a garage they had rented from a friend back in September 1998.
So, how exactly did Goggle grow to become the leading search engine? According to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they differentiated Google from other search engines by focusing on relationships between websites (commonly referred to as links).
Focusing on the Link Structure of the Web
In the 1990s, dominating search engines such as Lycos and AltaVista relied on a full-text search to find relevant pages. When a user would enter a search term, the search engines would compare the term against every word in their database. Web pages with words similar to the searched terms were considered more relevant and ranked higher in the search results. Learn more here.
However, the full-text search did not always produce the most logical results. For instance, searching for the term Microsoft’’ would have featured pages for retailers with dozens of Microsoft products before the actual Microsoft Homepage.
Larry Page created an algorithm for Google that analyzed the relevance of web pages based on hyperlinks. The algorithm (named PageRank) was developed to be similar to how academic papers are evaluated by users. Researchers pay closer attention to papers that cite other academic papers and consider how many times the paper has been cited by other researchers.
Put simply, PageRank calculated how many links there are on a web page and how many times that page has been referenced over the internet. This drastically improved Google’s accuracy of search results on the internet.
The Rise of Google
Focusing on links gave Google users access to the most relevant and accurate information related to their search queries. The concept quickly revolutionized how people searched the internet and attracted users from all over the world.
In just two years (from 1998-2000) Google rose to be the world’s largest search engine, defeating much older competitors like Lycos, Yahoo, and Alta Vista.
Improving with Age
Unlike its earlier competitors, Google kept improving with age by recalculating PageRank and building its index for a better search experience. But Google’s popularity and success have been a work of pure hard work and innovation. Their entire business model is focused solely on better user experience.