> When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple and easy to use.<p>> Yahoo was dominant back then, and it tried to put everyone and everything in front of you. Then we learned about the paralysis of choice. Too many choices, the mental fatigue weighed in, and the product became difficult to use.<p>This nonsense again? I was around then, and I switched from Yahoo and AltaVista to Google despite its dumb name and stupid, childish logo because <i>Google's results were hands-down better</i>. Instead of a solely full-text search paradigm based only on keyword density, Google also ranked pages based on how many other pages linked to them, the so-called "PageRank" algorithm.<p>This worked much, much better, and was much harder (for a while) to game. Before Google, it was common when searching to find pages that gamed the search engines by stuffing their <meta> keyword tags with SEO crap or putting it in giant footer sections in a tiny font the same color as the background (to render it invisible). Google's PageRank wasn't fooled by this.<p>Also most of the major search engines adopted similarly minimalist UIs, and it did <i>zero</i> to stop the bleeding. They <i>all</i> lost to google. (AltaVista, the pre-Google Google, was still useful for a while for some specialty searching, like for anonymous FTP servers, and I wonder if DEC had never gone under or if Compaq had spun off AltaVista, maybe history would be different.)<p>EDIT: I just realized the article <i>doesn't even mention AltaVista</i>. Unbelievable.