Google Agrees: They Are Good At Search

No false modesty exists at Google when it comes to the search service that springboarded their success.

Internet users who have witnessed the rise of Google as the dominant search engine remember what the Web was like before it. Other engines like Altavista did search with varying degrees of success and user satisfaction.

Google's arrival relegated Altavista and everyone else in search to second place status, if they were lucky. Their rise in search, coupled with a fortuitous entry into relevant contextual search advertising, made it a multi-billion dollar fixture on the Internet.

No one has been able to budge Google from its top spot in search. A discussion of their longevity began when their chief economist, Hal Varian, took questions from readers of the The professor answers this by saying Google is better because it keeps doing search improvements continually. He refers to a theory economists call "learning by doing" and what the rest of us might call "practice."

"Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors. It's not surprising that we've learned a lot about how to do this well," said Varian.

We are inclined to think inertia plays a part in keeping people coming back to Google. Index freshness has a role, which we see as even more important. Search at Yahoo, or Microsoft, or Ask works fine, but if Google has even more recent results to tap, that gives them as much of an edge as any ongoing improvements.