You know that you're doing something big when
your company name becomes a verb. Ask Xerox.
In 1959 they created the first plain paper copy
machine. It was one of the most successful
products ever. The company name Xerox grew
into a verb that means "to copy," as in "Bob, can
you Xerox this for me?" Around 50 years later, the
same thing happened to Google. Their company
name grew into a verb that means "to do an
internet search." Now everyone and their grandma
knows what it means to Google it.
Unlike Xerox, Google wasn't the first company to
invent their product, not by a long shot. Lycos
released their search engine in 1993. Yahoo! came
out in 1994. AltaVista began serving results in
1995. Google did not come out until years later, in
1998. Though a few years difference may not
seem like much, this is a major head start in the
fast moving world of tech. So how did Google do
it? How did they overtake their competitors who
had such huge leads in time and money? Maybe
one good idea made all the difference.
There are millions and millions of sites on the
internet. How does a search engine know which
ones are relevant to your search? This is a question
that great minds have been working on for
decades. To understand how Google changed the
game, you need to know how search engines
worked in 1998. Back then most websites looked
at the words in your query. They counted how
many times those words appeared on each page.
Then they might return pages where the words in
your query appeared the most. This system did not
work well and people often had to click through
pages and pages of results to find what they
wanted.