Google Flops, Fizzles and Failures

“There ain’t no sure thing, it’s just the roll of the dice” — Bobby Bare

In 1995–96 I wrote a monthly magazine column about the Internet. It’s one of the ways I learn about how things work, by writing about them.

My columns were very basic. What is a search engine? What is a browser? How does email work? What is the World Wide Web?

One column was called the Top 25 Search Engines. I essentially wrote a paragraph about all the search engines I could find, explaining their pros and cons, listing their URLs and making suggestions regarding why this or that was a favorite of mine. (Remember Inktomi?)

What’s remarkable to me is that even though this stable of search engines was a crowded one, Google didn’t even exist yet. What Google did was essentially very simple. They identified a weakness in the competition and exploited it. So many of those engines were getting bogged down with advertising, or were simply slow loading. Google offered a clean, uncluttered appearance and an extremely fast delivery time.

Before long they were the name of the game. You knew this because the name Google very quickly became a verb. “I think you should just Google that.” Or, “I Googled ‘chimpanzee’ and got 19 million results in 0.75 seconds. Wow!”

Their success was such that they not only became the dominant player in search engines, they also built on this success with a whole batch of successful follow up products and services. Here are just a…