> Sure, search engines sucked (algorithm-wise) before Google but the concept/idea of a technology to aggregate links by relevance, was pretty critical to Google's existence, IMHO.
Certainly Pagerank was important, but I would assume(so I could be wrong) there were Pagerank copycats in the early days. Having Pagerank was a necessity for Google or any copycat to become the best search engine. But it's the dozens of other things that they did at Google that were just as necessary to make a search site that didn't suck IMHO. Clean, fast, simple, etc. I think Pagerank was great but if you were to drop that behind the UI of a competing search engine it wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as it did at Google.
But my assumptions could be wrong. Maybe Google's IP prevented anyone from doing a PR copycat and that led to its success.
Certainly Pagerank was important, but I would assume(so I could be wrong) there were Pagerank copycats in the early days. Having Pagerank was a necessity for Google or any copycat to become the best search engine. But it's the dozens of other things that they did at Google that were just as necessary to make a search site that didn't suck IMHO. Clean, fast, simple, etc. I think Pagerank was great but if you were to drop that behind the UI of a competing search engine it wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as it did at Google.
But my assumptions could be wrong. Maybe Google's IP prevented anyone from doing a PR copycat and that led to its success.