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Google in 1999: Search engines escape the portal matrix
Like Morpheus in The Matrix, Google gave web users a stark choice in 1999: take the red pill and experience a new world of search quality, or choose the blue pill and stick with the bloated world of portal search.
That’s if you could even find the search box on their busy web pages — bursting with news headlines, directory listings, weather widgets, horoscopes, chat and email logins, and so forth. “The publicly indexable World-Wide Web now contains about 800 million pages, encompassing about 6 terabytes of text data on about 3 million servers,” wrote Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles in the Nature article, entitled “Accessibility of information on the web.” Interestingly, they concluded that new “popularity” based forms of indexing — the authors specifically mentioned Google and a site called DirectHit — would decrease the accessibility of information on the web. In August, based on numbers from an analytics firm called Media Metrix, Sullivan estimated that “Yahoo had risen to its highest share ever” as the most popular search engine, with about 46% audience reach.
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