Stavros Portal: Fill & Download for Free

There are various reasons that Google succeeded:A better algorithm (see below).Focus on search, undiluted with portal features.No ads for the first n years.Minimalist design.High speed (related to minimal design and no portal). Google engineers focused on speed where many competitors didn’t.Results were not influenced by payments. (“Don’t be evil.”)Patient investors who overlooked the lack of revenue, and even the lack of a plan for revenue, trusting that being a major destination site on the Web could be made to pay off eventually. This meant that they never got into the portal business.Luck.Early search engines used the same technology as traditional document search systems, basing results on an analysis of the words within the document.But on the Web, people quickly discovered that they could game that system by adding additional keywords to their pages, by duplicating their pages many times, and so on. The original PageRank algorithm complements within-document criteria with a reputation system which analyzes the link structure of the Web. This immediately made Google results much better.Of course, since then, people have invented a variety of ways of trying to fool PageRank, but Google continues to work on countermeasures.

Three main reasons:The early Web search engines showed result pages as a function of what was on the page, just like previous document search engines. Later signals used for ranking included the popularity of the page (as determined by who clicked on the result in previous searches) and the link text of pages linking to them. Google analyzed the structure of the global graph of links relating pages (PageRank) to estimate their importance or reputation. This became increasingly important as the Web became an adversarial arena, where sites were competing with each other to fool search engines into returning them. Of course, since then, the search system has become much more complicated.Google was fast. Google built a scalable infrastructure (lots of commodity servers) that was cheap to scale, so could keep up with growing usage while remaining fast.For many years, Google focused on good search results shown in a minimal interface, and didn’t even try to make money or expand to other areas. Other engines had a narrow and short-term focus on making money, and made many user-unfriendly and counterproductive decisions because of that, such as blending paid and nonpaid (“organic”) results, becoming all-purpose portals, and burying search results among too many, too low-quality, ads.(BTW, I formerly worked at Google, but not in search, and I wasn’t around in the early days, so I have no inside information on any of this. I actually worked for a different Web search engine at one point. I am speaking for myself, not any of my past employers.)

The biggest thing around is not exactly what you are looking for but is worthwhile to look at:http://www.helpareporter.comYou receive three emails a day and reply to things that you feel are a good fit. So it's indirect, takes time to do in order to get interviewed, but people do get media if spend time.I was a TV producer, finding experts a huge time consuming problem. My startup mediaspotme.com lists experts for journalists to search. Only open to professors at the moment, others can apply to join and if approved will be added when pen more widely.