As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s.
The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry.
That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.
It got to the point Altavista became more or less useless, and when Google showed up on the market they quickly took it over.
Seems the time is ripe for a new revolution. Doesn't have to be a better search engine, could be something completely different.
Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings?
To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results were best when PageRank was the dominant metric. As they moved more and more in the direction of prioritising news, commerce and the aspects we call SEO, “number of links pointing TO the resource” became less and less important in the ranking. And as that happened, the quality of results dropped, and the content silo-ing rose up.
PageRank was peer-review. SEO is “who shouts the loudest”.