Do you remember when you were first introduced to Google.com? It’s almost hard to imagine a life before them, isn’t it? (B.G. – Before Google?) Their impact on the internet cannot be understated. As Google has come to dominate what it means to search the net, they’ve integrated themselves into our lives, our browsers, and our cell phones. But this wasn’t always the case. Ten years ago, Google was just some new search engine trying to make a name for itself amid competitors like Excite and Yahoo.
Last night, we received a link to a little bit of Google nostalgia and we thought we would share it with you, too. Doug Sherrets, Business Development Manager at Slide, Inc. and occasional contributor over at Venture Beat, sent us over to this Facebook page where he had reposted a blog entry that he had written on November 16th, 1998 at age 14 about a tiny startup called Google. We thought you would enjoy it too:
“A new search engine is Google.com, founded by some kids out of Stanford, the same university where Excite and Yahoo spawned. You might think the search engine market has already developed and today’s leaders — like Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite — are going to be the search engine leaders for years to come. Guess what? You’re wrong. Start-ups like Google will offer better services, and unless the established players react, they’ll lose market share. Whether you like the name or not, Google is going to be a search engine to be reckoned with.”
“While Google won’t be #1 overnight, they’ll get up there because people will like their search over Yahoo, Lycos, or Excite. Google produces accurate results, and that is what search is all about, right?”
“Can just a search engine company support a $1+ billion market value? Those billion dollar companies have more services like personalization, chat, and message boards other than search. You’re right, but if you take search away, you take away the basis of the whole site. Users don’t go to a portal to get stock news, they go to a portal to get to where they want to go. They might stop for a couple minutes on the portal using the extra services, but internet investors have to remember the epicenter of the whole business is the search engine. Instead of portals putting search on the backburner and letting their indexes get outdated, they should be buying out companies like AskJeeves and Google. They are the future.”
