John Battelle's Searchblog

That was an interesting discussion - but there are a few points that need to be debated here.

The full quote is referenced at the very bottom of this comment - that seems to be of concern...

///antiseptic portal like Yahoo or Excite or Lycos

Yahoo Excite and Lycos offered a portal - however, they also offered ORGANIC SERPs.

Yahoo admitedly DID prioritize the Directory listings FIRST - but it did have AltaVista and Inktomi for their Natural SERPs.

Also their edited directory WAS high quality (for simple to moderate searches - which most people were doing at that time) - so there was no problems with Relevancy - and the more complex searches did automatically go to the other mentioned engines.

Don't forget, AltaVista WAS a great resource for it's time - they did have alot of SPAM but you could find virtually EVERYTHING you needed.

The rise of Google was in part to the Sharp decline around 2000 / 2001 of AltaVista - they just ABRUPTLY changed their Algos.

The rise of Google was also in part - due to the partnership with Yahoo and AOL - Inktomi just was not that great at relevance.

AlltheWeb - and to a smaller degree, Dogpile gave a little hope during the pre-Google days - but it just was NOT developed with as much enthusiasm.

Finally, the once darling, YAHOO! STILL holds a HUGE chunk of the Search Market Population - it really is NOT that far behind Google, according to many of the Statistical Data being released quarterly by well-known resources... (and MSN does still have a consistantly smaller impact on it's own)

Yahoo and MSN are improving dramatically in relevance - many say Google is declining - What will the landscape be by the end of this decade?????

here is the quote:
///What Google managed to do is remember that the reason we search is to find things, potentially things that aren't in an antiseptic portal like Yahoo or Excite or Lycos, and Google did a good job of bringing people on to their site to search and putting them off to the rest of the Internet to find what they might be looking for. Many other sites gave up on that in the late 1990s. It turns out Google had the right approach. And we can see the results today.