About a year ago I was included in a 60 Minutes piece on Google, produced by Rome Hartman and reported by Leslie Stahl. It was a fun process, and as it turns out, they used a lot of my thoughts in the piece. I figured I’d be lucky if they boiled me down to one not so stupid sounding bite, but instead, I was on for nearly as much time as the Google founders. Go figure. (My mom was ecstatic).
One year later, Rome Hartman has been elevated to Executive Producer of all of CBS News, and that Google piece won an Emmy. I’d like to thank my family, my readers, my….wait, you mean they don’t give statues to the people *in* the piece?! Sheesh.
There is one concern about that quote made on the Interview – lest we forget, putting someones name in Yahoo or MSN will now yeild the same basic results – google may have a more “supplimental” pages – but the substantial bulk of the information will be the same.
What is of concern about that statement is that around the time Google first came into being – they were NOT very relevant – AltaVista was the Oasis – but something happened to both of them around late 1999 …
apparently AV’s decline left the door open to both AlltheWeb and Google to fill the void….
If there is anyone out there who knows anything verifiable about Why AltaVista changed – please share…
This is one of the greatest Search Engine Mysteries – ever…
Wonder what happened to the AV Chiefs who oversaw the change
I think making your mom pround is probably as good as the Emmy.
That’s just spooky. I was watching that video last night after running across a copy on my hard disk.
Weird.
And, well, congrats… I guess. 🙂
Agreeed with Joe about moms and Emmys.
In terms of search engines (and I know I am in the minority here) I think Google succeeded not so much because they had a better search engine (that helped, of course) but because their lean home page said to people: “We are hear to get you the information you want.” That has made people like them. We will see if they let their greed change that, as it may in my view is they start running ads on the homepage.
Search Engines Web: If you are serious about knowing why AV cratered, I’d suggest you, uh, read John’s book. He lays it out pretty darn well — a classic tale of misguided corporate direction meets a service being passed around from owner to owner.
– Stuart
John covers what happened to Alta Vista in his book (a good read btw John) – basically internal politics inside DEC (as it was then) followed by the wrong business model (portals).
I think SorenG makes a good point. When I first started using Google (1999?) it came across as a breath of fresh air… the issue of user/customer trust can’t be overstated.