News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Popular Web Strategies That Don’t Work by jff on Monday July 25, 2011 @04:27PM (#2804464)
I like how in #1 he says, "Don't just do what others are doing!", then goes on in #2 to say, "You don't have to be original! Google wasn't the first search engine!"

Google is a good example, in fact, because they followed #1, #3, #4, and quite possibly #2 (a search engine that doesn't suck? How novel!). There also might be doses of #5 sprinkled throughout Google's work.

Re:Popular Web Strategies That Don’t Work by Wilduck on Monday July 25, 2011 @04:52PM (#2804555)
The difference is that in the #1 point he was talking about not simply implementing the features of a competitor. If you notice company B has feature X and therefore decide you must have it as well, you may be in trouble if it turns out feature X isn't useful and is hard to implement.

So, it's obvious that while Google wasn't the first search engine, they also weren't simply copying Altavista's feature list.