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Oh I can totally do this one. So yahoo and excite were search engines but a they brought in having an account and a customized home page. Others did as well but I would say excite was bests followed by yahoo but yahoo introduced tabs to its interface which, I think, is the reason they won out at the time. Here is the thing. The engines where kinda simple. They crawled the web and searched through them. Now in 2000 I was at a conference and someone is like. oh man you have to use google its results are better. And it was very true. Later I learned it was because of an algorithm that the founders had that did this page ranking based on the number of links to it. It made a lot of sense as this is actually what you see in academia with papers. So they just applied it to the web in a much more automated way. Then adding synopsises of pages to the search results was a big thing but they were already dominating by then. oh and gmail got a lot of people to make accounts. they offered a gig of storage when 5meg was common and 100meg was massive. that really is what hit yahoo sa their thing was kinda the logged in experience. Adding free general office sotware and general sotware was a cherry on top to keep people on.
Ok. so now you got to understand that algorithms were generally viewed as positive back then. Google certainly went into customized ads but they were pretty decent at anonymizing it. So ads could be directed in general terms to the audience. Facebook is what brought it into the hyper engagement and very specific tracking of every aspect of you.
This guy got it. Google was legitimately better at search. Google ads used to be viewed as being much less obnoxious than other ads. And Gmail was offering so much space people thought it was an April Fools joke for weeks
oh yeah. I forgot how it came out april first.
The thing to keep in mind is that an algorithm is the instrument which optimizes for some incentive structure. In the early days of Google Search, the incentive was predominantly Adsense ads displayed alongside the search results. So to optimize views of these ads, the search algorithm had to be good enough so that people would keep coming back to Google Search for their web search needs. More users means more views means more eyeballs for ads.
What changed everything started with the incentive, when it became clear that marketers' demands to hyper-target consumers could be met if websites like Google or Facebook could learn more about users than just the search terms they entered. This is when user tracking took off, where the incentive is now to monetize user habits and identity, ideally cross referenced to their social media profiles or login details.
With that new incentive, the way to optimize that is to use tracking cookies and to expand Google Analytics and AdSense so they appear on even more websites, each of which would report data back to Google as users moved around the web. Note how this means the quality of web search is no longer important, because whether or not the user lingers on Google Search, their habits are still recorded and monetizable. In this sense, we would say that the algorithm's optimizing incentive is no longer aligned with the user's interests, such as privacy or performance.
Capitalism, as always, requires an examination into incentive structures, and this explains pretty much most of what Google has been doing vis-a-vis web behavior for the last decade, with the notable exception of their Gemini AI. I readily admit that I have no idea how AI fits into their web search business model, apart from being a loss leader that keeps up the impression that they're a major player in the current bubble. And I often wonder if they have any idea too.
thats a good summary. my best guess with ai is people are already using it as some sort of confidant so for a certain segment of the population they are just going to know more about them than their own brain will allow them to about themselves.