An excerpt from the new book In the Plex by Steven Levy, quoted in the Quora post:
"Over the course of that two years Page and Brin had figured out Backrub's applicability to web search, failed to license the technology to Excite or Altavista, and had founded their own company."
I still remember the days when Altavista was the very best at Web search, and Excite had some features that made it worth checking as a plan B. It was near the end of the two years described in the excerpt when I started noticing Backrub regularly crawling my site, which used to rely primarily on Yahoo for online search referrals. I became a Google user as soon as the Web crawling from Google identified a site I could visit to see the sender of the Web crawler in action. I became hooked almost immediately, and started telling my friends about Google in online forums as I discovered more and more pleasantly surprising highly relevant results from searches I did. Too bad for Altavista and Excite that neither company grabbed PageRank and other Google technologies when they had the chance.
As I remember it, the "highly relevant" results on Google were almost exclusively determined by a $299 Yahoo! Directory listing or a DMOZ directory listing. If you could get the Yahoo Directory or DMOZ to link to you with your preferred anchor text - you were all but guaranteed the #1 spot on Google. Of course it didn't mean as much back then, but boy was it easy.
This brings back a lot of memories. Like you said, Yahoo! was referring all of the traffic. For those of you that weren't around or don't remember - the Yahoo Directory was based on the alphabet, like the phone book. I had to beat out AAAUsedLaptops.com with exclamation-point-used-laptops.com (listed as "! Used Laptops"). No wonder Google won.
There were plenty of good websites in those days that had (and still have) DMOZ listings absolutely for free. That's even more so for the earliest sites listed on Yahoo back in its human-curated days.
"Over the course of that two years Page and Brin had figured out Backrub's applicability to web search, failed to license the technology to Excite or Altavista, and had founded their own company."
I still remember the days when Altavista was the very best at Web search, and Excite had some features that made it worth checking as a plan B. It was near the end of the two years described in the excerpt when I started noticing Backrub regularly crawling my site, which used to rely primarily on Yahoo for online search referrals. I became a Google user as soon as the Web crawling from Google identified a site I could visit to see the sender of the Web crawler in action. I became hooked almost immediately, and started telling my friends about Google in online forums as I discovered more and more pleasantly surprising highly relevant results from searches I did. Too bad for Altavista and Excite that neither company grabbed PageRank and other Google technologies when they had the chance.