Internet Search
At the beginning of the internet, a huge number of websites were created and held tons of information, but finding it was time-consuming and difficult to navigate through. This problem was recognized by two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were sneakily using the internet to win a fantasy basketball league. A directory was needed to search the internet for what users needed, thus “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was made in January of 1994. They would find websites and created and put them categories that users would look through to find links on the internet to what they needed. It quickly became Yahoo, the first of its kind, a simple search engine for internet users to use. But, with its success, problems were bound to arise.
Yahoo needed money to expand as a company and Yang and Filo were not making any revenue with it; no one was making money on the Internet. Advertising was the only way to commercialize the web and with the fear of losing loyal customers, in 1995 Yahoo took a risk and began taking in ads. Luckily, users and advertisers had multiplied, proving that making money online was possible. Within the next year, competitors of Yahoo emerged, like Excite, who used pure software to look for web pages. The competition brought out flashier add ons to their websites and ads that led to unneeded things took over. Yahoo and Excite started to forget why they started in the first place, the search aspect. A new way of searching the web was needed, signalling the start of Google.
Google was a search engine with its beginnings also starting at Stanford University. This infinite search engine was created by students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. It became so successful, but they needed support to continue running. After every search company turned down Google, even Excite, the creators were desperate, which is when investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, gave them $100,000 for Google and more investors saw this and continued to put in money. This money wasn’t enough; Google needed ads to become a profitable company. Page and Brin found an advertising idea from Bill Gross’ Overture, which used keywords and sponsored links to handle billions of microtransactions. Before using the idea, Google wanted to work together and blend ideas, but like most deals, it didn’t work out. Soon after, Google released a new version with an idea too similar to Overture, that they were brought to court. Luckily, the two sides settled and all Google had to do was tweak their idea, which laid the foundation for internet advertising.
By the end of 1995, Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer, which Gates made known that it was going to be used to destroy Netscape. Microsoft’s team working with Internet explorer had many advantages with their financial resources and talented coders. This allowed for them to catch up to Netscape quickly. They tracked Netscape’s every move and copied it, continued releasing new versions of Internet Explorer, and worked day and night to make sure that their browser would not lose. Gates even took it a step further and hired salesmen to sell the browser to every Microsoft customer, who used dark, hidden tactics to stop PC manufacturers from installing anything but Internet Explorer. Netscape struggled with profits and began going downhill. Due to Internet Explorer’s growing popularity and Microsoft’s billions of dollars in worth, the browser was made free with Windows, a power move by Microsoft.
By August 19, 2004, Google had gone public in stocks and what was once a company making zero dollars in revenue became a company worth 3 billion dollars. It seemed to have an unconventional way of doing business. But, Google had so much success in the end. They had hundreds of dollars in trades and were able to take over many things and branch out. Google holds so much more information than any other search engine out there to this day.
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