The History of Search and the Power of People

It's hard to believe 10 years ago there was no Google, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube  All of these have become a norm for our generation and it's hard to imagine a world without them. But, there was once a time when you had to go to the library to do research and the only way you kept in touch with old classmates was if you really tried. Thank goodness times have changed.

From the video "Search" it's interesting to learn that Yahoo, Excite and Google all started with Stanford college students. What are the odds that all the first search engines would come from one place?

Yahoo's founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, were looking for sports information when they game up with an idea that it would be nice to have everything categorized, instead of just wildly searching the internet for information. So, Yahoo was formed to help internet users search the internet more efficiently. They were also the first to learn how to make money on the internet by using advertising. At first, Filo and Yang were hesitant to put ads up fearing that it would turn users away, but when the ads launched users continued using the search engine, unfazed. Soon, competitors appeared and one competitor, Excite had a new way for searching for information.

Unlike Yahoo's manual listing of websites to their respective categories, Excite was pure software. Instead of having to add the websites themselves, for users to search through, all users had to do was enter in a query. The software would then search the internet for related material. Much like an early Google.

Finally, the king of all search engines was created. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had come up with a way for their search engine to search for sites that would be more credible to its users. They used links, a kind of recommendation, where the number of times a page was linked to by another, raised its credibility and would make it appear higher in a Google search. Google had also found a way for companies to pay to have their names come up higher in searches, leading to a less cluttered search engine.

The video "Power People" was all about how users are the driving force behind some of today's most popular sites. YouTube is a place where everyone can have their own "station" and become popular among their followers. Facebook is where you can follow your friends lives, and let them follow yours, and Digg is news stories that the users think are important, not the media.

All of these are great file sharing sites, but they owe a lot to Napster, the first file sharing network.

Napster was created to allow users to share music between one another, for free, instead of having to go out and by album after album to get the music that you wanted. It quickly spread among college students, almost like an overnight sensation. Napster is said to be the "game changer in music sharing over the internet," and paved the way for other music sharing sites, like iTunes. Unfortunately, Napster didn't last very long but that didn't stop it from having an impact on file sharing in the future.

With Napster's failure came many more successes. iTunes was created to let users buy just the songs they wanted, instead of the whole cd. YouTube, Facebook and blogs are a way for users to get other there with the opinion and connect with others across the world. They are all apart of what is called Web 2.0, where everyday is impacted by individuals.