It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess.
To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast.
And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits).
Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user.
(Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)
What is the best way to learn how to execute at a very high level as Google does?
We are a 25 person tech startup and while our culture is amazing we struggle with execution. This is an ongoing struggle for us; it’s so easy for a young startup to misunderstand the importance of execution.
Is reading books enough, if so, which? Should we hire a COO from a company with a history of excellent execution (how to tell?). Are there courses to take? Or is it just about prioritizing excellent execution with continuous learning?
Some resources that have helped so far: Scaling Up (book) and
First Round Review blog.
IME the thing that matters the most is focus, both on the micro and macro level. It's way too easy to get caught on things that won't make an iota of difference in your future. Focus is the first thing that goes out the window as soon a a company reach just a bit of momentum.
I've seen several startups suffering from not being able to decide what they were. Engineering teams fractured because the company wanted half of them working on their bottom line and the other half working in some offshoot product.
Even gigantic companies need that: notice how people criticize Google for creating and killing way too many products, and at the same time praising their minimalist webpage (since 1998), early GMail, etc. Same with Apple when Jobs returned to Apple and streamlined their product line, etc.
I agree with this but want to add prioritisation is key. As per Fred Brooks, there is no silver bullet. What he meant by that is that you can't get an order of magnitude more work done using a tool or process because in programming, 25% of your time is spent doing analysis and there is no way to reduce that (To me, that's only if you are executing well!). This generalises to a lot of other pursuits.
Prioritisation is about deciding what not to do. Forget the BS story about putting rocks and sand in a jar, where the secret is to put the big rocks in first so that everything fits. That's not how you need to do prioritisation, because order does not appreciable change the amount of time something takes. The secret is to put only the big rocks in. Period. You go 6 times faster because you have 6 things you could do, but you only do one of them.
Now the real kicker is that the only way to determine which one thing to do is to do analysis on all 6. An HN post is not really a reasonable way to describe this. However, consider a requirements discovery to be like a tree. Requirements are discovered at a particular rate, as you work on something. Discovery of one requirement leads to discovery of new requirements. It's a feedback loop. Pruning the tree as early as you can leads to significant gains later on. So while you can't actually get the 6x development time by avoiding 5/6ths of the requirements, you can pretty easily get 2-3x gains.
BTW, for anyone interested in a more rigorous approach, consider taking something like Littlewood's model of defect discovery and assuming that requirements discovery has a similar curve. Littlewood's model is very naive, but I've found that it still has a lot of value. Again, sorry for cryptic hints here, but I don't have time to write a book on it (which it would certainly take...)
The parent comment on focus and this comment on extreme prioritization are so helpful.
Recently we are focused on just one objective and key result - it took years to get that far - we used to have so many. But even now with just one objective we still picked 25 initiatives to attempt to reach our goal. In retrospect it was an obvious fail because we only executed on a few well. We did some initial analysis but considering your comment I think we could have done much more analysis and cut much deeper and picked just a few or even just one. This is radical thinking!
Thank you for getting deeper into this. Do you have any other hints on where I could learn more about the approach you are describing?
Google's success was due to marketing and the opportunity to do so at massive scale (wide reach of and frequent media coverage). Even PageRank's mention was marketing, though the world at large had no idea what it meant.
Most latched on to Google due to marketing surrounding and due to their IPO. Many heard and understood: money, billions, billionaire, slides and bicycles, etc.
After, continued marketing kept it all going. Powerful illusion. Google is the embodiment of candy coated BS. Even now, they mainly continue due to continually marketing themselves as greatness..
..and paying for Chrome, Android, and first placement on iPhones.
They even had internal studies showing that while they are pervasive (most use at least one of their products), there isn't any stickiness. That is, if some other search engine had first placement on iPhones, the majority would be using that one. It's like the site that previously appeared when searching for a definition (dictionary.com?): while many used it and did so frequently, they often didn't even realize where they were.
The world (and internet, even) at large is very different from the handful who think themselves aligned with the masses (ie, source of revenue). It's even funnier, as most thinking anyone cared about PageRank don't buy anything. No spending = you don't exist. Anything else is a coincidental nod, stupidity, or coincidence.
Disagree. Google just had way better results than every other search engine. Secondly, it had a much more streamlined and simple interface (they had a simple search box with a "Search" Button -- no page directory, no email, no banner ads -- during that time period search engines had giant directories of pages by category when you first opened them up) . People would often refer novice users to Google because there were less points of confusion. By the time the company IPO'd they were already on an exponential tear.
I agree they were organic'ish (ie, word of mouth and ZDTV) in the beginning (1998-2000 or so). As for search quality, you're seeing their growth from the point of view of a higher-than-norm-IQ-intuitor-type-rational than from the median/typical/pervasive point of view. The majority of internet/Google users aren't the "early adopter" types. They mainly use Google because that's what's there on there phone.
Look, I'm certainly not a Google fan as of today, but you are so wrong, probably for being very very young or very very misinformed; probably both.
I tried Google 1st time when it was an university project that didn't even have its own domain (that is, it was a Stanford subdomain), and I was literally blown away by the huge difference compared to all other search engines. At that time my favorite was Altavista though back then doing multiple searches on different search engines was normal as all of them had their very different crawlers and algorithms, so I usually went at least also through Yahoo and Lycos after Altavista. But when Google came out it set up a huge improvement in search reponses, and I mean orders of magnitude faster, nobody did anything even comparable to that before, and soon it became clear that all of us would end up using just one search engine - guess which one. They developed that from scratch with no funding at all, and of course they got money after that but it came because of the great product they had developed, not the other way around.
Google started as the project any hacker would dream to be part of, even for free. What it became after all that money changed it is a different story.
Are you reading the same thing I'm writing? Is that why you think Google is used by the masses, rather than marketing and control of first placement (on Chrome, Android, and iPhones)?
Most people just use what's there and that happened to be Google's search engine. It's especially the case after massive growth of internet users due to mobile (ie, there were only ~300 million internet users in 1998 versus the billions online today).
Have you seen Google's growth chart? It was meteoric. All these things you mention came in or after 2007. Google was already a behemoth by the early 2000s and that was because it was just way better than anything else.
Yeah, this is completely wrong. I watched Google grow up having worked in the area and they didn’t have any marketing at the beginning. They first became the best search engine many years before they started adding ads and well before their IPO.
Just as significantly, the search results were also uncluttered, and "good enough".
This approach was absolutely critical when they started out, when people would most often be using 56k modems, where every byte had a real impact on the end user experience.
Yes, every byte mattered. I was there. Only "early adopter" types were "in it for the speed." Everyone else used what was there. Everyone that was online, as most weren't.
They got larger maybe because they also kept going (didn't have a choice; tried to sell early on for pennies, though they spin the story to distract from what happened). The other engines were bought or sold out.
The death of many companies during the bust also made room for them and they were likely the face of a group effort to "keep it all moving." Facebook was a similar face.
It's funny how knowing makes it seem you don't know. You sound naive and brainwashed. But all it does is once again show how powerful an illusion can really be. I'd (and did) say similar things if I didn't dig deeper.
Being the best search engine was irrelevant to their rise. It's just a thing that happened to also (supposedly) be there.
Supposedly, as its ranking algorithm was so heavily gamed by 2007 (already risen; popularity incentivized effort to game) it was a complete joke. Powerful illusion again, as they just covered it up and moved on. Also, internal tests from around 2009-2010 showed Bing was seen by users as producing better-quality results.
Not only did they not have much marketing at the beginning, they also didn't have many users.
No, you are entirely wrong. There's no part of your "analysis" that has any relation to reality. I don't understand why you keep insisting.
(I worked for two of Google's competitors in the years where they grew from a student project to a huge business. I had the opportunity to take a peek of the code of two other competitors. Many of my former colleagues helped build Bing. I also worked at Google for a few years. I was there so I would know something about it)
No, it had nothing to do with marketing. It had everything to do with focus on building the best search experience.
I don't understand why you are raving on about Chrome and iPhones. The iPhone was almost a decade away when Google started getting traction, and building a browser wasn't even at the idea stage.
I did a single search on Google back in the '90s and never left. The quality gap was enormous, and it has stayed like this ever since. What world do you live in ?
It is naive to think the belief in this skewed, biased, self-referencing, curated group is representative.
The general internet user is different, much less concerned with the underlying tech or anything else, and about other things. The general internet user thinks Facebook is the internet, don't realize they are online, and only use online services to text and take/post pictures.
Android phones have a camera icon. Ever thought about the camera app associated with it? Not really if an Android user. You just use it or use it as a backup. If it were another app, you'd be using that one. Wouldn't notice.
Most people don't spend time digging, unless it's something they are really into. Most also don't read reviews or research, though that's been changing over the years. They just go with whatever, unless important (to them).
Not sure what you think you understood while at Yahoo, but Yahoo never used PageRank. Inlink-based signals, obviously, but never PageRank. Also, to state the obvious: Google's own execution of PageRank is orders of magnitude more complicated than what's been published. I fully agree with the greater point you are making however. Google is still at heart an engineering excellence company.
Yahoo had three search engines when I was there. Inktomi, FAST and Altavista. I came to Yahoo through the acquisition of FAST's web search business, and we had a variant of page rank which was developed some time in the summer/fall of 1999. I shared an office with the guy who wrote it. After the initial implementation it went through lots of evolution. As did everything in search.
What gets people confused is that they tend to think this was the only mechanism in use and that it was a solution that never evolved. Things also get confused by the fact that not everybody knew everything. (For instance, hardly anything in the "official" origin story of FAST is true, and you'll get conflicting stories depending on who you ask).
I don't think the Altavista engine was ever used. I think the people from Altavista ended up on Panama, Vespa and possibly some on the Inktomi-based engine. The FAST and Inktomi engines were both in use for a short while for web search, and then the effort was split so the FAST engine was used in what became Vespa (where pagerank isn't as good a mechanism as for the web). Vespa grew out of work at FAST that started around 2002-2003 to separate out the more infrastructural bits of the search engine into more reusable infrastructure components).
Eventually Inktomi was used for web search at Yahoo. Simply because of geography (well, politics). Since Inktomi didn't really have anywhere to go that pretty much sealed the fate of Yahoo as maker of a web search. You might be thinking of Inktomi.
If you literally mean Yahoo never used the exact specification of the PageRank algorithm, that's probably correct. But if you mean PageRank conceptually, which includes any general search algorithm based on a discrete time Markov process, that's incorrect.
In 2004 Yahoo acquired several smaller companies which were working on algorithmic search and page linking around the same time that Google was. They released their own ranking algorithm called WebRank which was substantially based on the methods of PageRank.
Yahoo's core search engine was based on Inktomi's, which was acquired in 2003. There was no PageRank in there, and there was no infrastructure to execute anything similar either. (I worked for a significant amount of time on link-level features during Marissa's rebirth of Yahoo Search.) PageRank is an algorithm that is trivial to understand and prototype, but hard to scale efficiently to 100's of billions of pages.
That's largely true. But not quite, as Yahoo also acquired the FAST engine. However, since the team developing this were located in Trondheim, Norway, the FAST-based web search was eventually discontinued (and morphed into the VESPA project).
Fascinating! This explains why I never saw anything like PageRank in YST: I presume it was present in what became Vespa (which, to be fair, probably didn't scale to YST's corpora sizes.) Pity we can't continue this conversation offline..
Of course we can continue the conversation offline. I'm not hard to find :-).
Yeah, VESPA wouldn't have scaled back then, but the search engine we used was far more scalable than Inktomi since it was the same search engine we used for web search. We did hold the record for largest index for a while (to distract people from the fact that our ranking was lagging behind Google's :-)).
But the search engine itself wasn't really the point for VESPA. Also page rank wasn't really as relevant for the use-cases VESPA was for. In fact, ranking in small, special corpora is very different from ranking in web search. And in the case of small document corpora: surprisingly hard, so one depended on tools to specialize both search, ranking and result processing.
I wrote the first implementation of the VESPA QRS with a couple of other guys, which I think was the second component in VESPA (if you count the fsearch/fdispatch as the first). I think this was the first step towards making easily customizable search. The big initial barrier was to convince people Java would be fast enough for this. (I was prepared for a 30% loss of performance in exchange for ease of extension. What we got was a 200% performance boost over the C++ implementation before even starting to optimize. But it was a bit of work to make it play nice with GC in Java and I remember David Jeske at Google refusing to believe me when I outlined how we'd done it :-))
An interesting question is what would have happened if Yahoo had chosen FAST web search instead of Inktomi. According to Jeff Dean, our search engine was the only competitor he was worried about (mentioned over lunch in may 2005 after i accepted a position at Google). Possibly because he didn't understand why it performed well. We made some fundamentally different design bets than Google (they bet RAM would become cheap fast, we bet that it wouldn't. They were right).
Inktomi was a technological dead end. That was a stupid choice by Yahoo top management based solely on geography and reflecting the ineptitude of top management when it came to technology.
To be quite frank, I think Yahoo would have flubbed web search either way. The only reason VESPA managed to survive at all was because it was being developed in Trondheim Norway - far away from Sunnyvale where we could get away ... well, bullshitting leaders and pretending to obey them while doing our own thing. Not that we weren't in deep doo-doo initially (we were in over our heads), but we had some really great people that were able to orchestrate the mess that was VESPA into something that worked, and then something that worked well.
Without mentioning any names, Yahoo had a problem with technologically inept leaders as well as too many useless middle managers. At the time just before we were acquired by Yahoo, it was quite clear that separating out important bits of the search engine into infrastructure components was key. Google had understood this early and done a few very important things (GFS, Protobuffers, MapReduce, Borg etc).
The funny thing was: our first two versions of our search engine (in 1998 and 1999) essentially used MR for crawling and processing, but we did so with shell scripts and duct tape (it was a mess). Anything that could be turned into "sort and scan", as we thought of it, could be done fast. Including page rank and deduplication - and deduplication was a much, much, much harder problem than page rank.
And when I say shell scripts and duct tape: we used unix sort, pipes, shell scripts and various small programs to do "mapping" and "reduction" :-) (strictly speaking, we used our own version of UNIX sort to have the same sorting order on all platforms, but essentially unix sort). Management were only focused on short term sales to portals, so we just reimplemented the same primitives over and over and over in every piece of technology we made. Wasting a ton of time and effort.
I was working on a storage system at the time that was sort of a combination of GFS, MR and Borg (the design came from before the papers about GFS etc were published). The idea was to have a distributed storage on which you could execute code in a sandboxed environment on each node. Meaning that you send the code to where the data lives and process it locally in a parallel manner and stream output to other nodes in the system. After certain executives felt a need to get involved and dictate technology choices I figured the project was doomed and abandoned it. (It was, for a while, known as "the storage system that can't store stuff").
Today I think that my approach would have been too complex to be sufficiently easy to develop. There were certain things about GFS I really didn't like (too trusting of clients), but slicing the problem into distinct domains was the right thing to do. Also, Google had Chubby and we didn't.
It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess.
To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast.
And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits).
Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user.
(Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)