Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004.
I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.
Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market.
Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.
Yea, that's easy to say now.
I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.
Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?
I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.
Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google
Because it’s not there on mobile
Because it is useless now.
> Alta-Vista were still loading
Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end.
The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.
This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer.
See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture.
We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.
But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.
And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.
And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
FWIW, I preferred AltaVista over Google back in the day.
I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work.
And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
Webcrawler was faster than both!
When did Google pivot to advertising?
Before the IPO; AdSense came out in 2003. Before that they really make much money.
Simple text ads to start. It was built on MySQL, Java and C++ and became how they made most of their money.