| Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would see which were preferred. The goal of Google is to make the result the user wants #1 on that list. So you would have known searches and you could compare the old result and the new. This was actually labor-intensive on Google scale and thus expensive. It also had problems. For example, certain results might be time-sensitive. Searching for "Simone Biles" now should have her Olympic results near the top of the list. Run that same query in 2 years and the desired result will be different. Also, user behaviour changes over time. If you had user search data from 2000, how would you deal with Reddit search results now? Or the SEO content farms that came later? You need ongoing user behaviour data to continually refine search results. It's a constant arms race. So along comes Chrome. Originally then-CEO Eric Schmidt didn't really see why Google should get into the browser business. This was in the 2000s. But we were still in the grip of the IE dominance although it was waning and Firefox was floundering. In the 2000s browser support was a much bigger problem than it is today. It's why we got things like jQuery. But Chrome went ahead and even from Chrome 2 or 3 it was so much better than anything else. One big innovation was a process-per-tab. FF was known for freezing the entire browser because each tab was a thread. But why did Google invest so much in this? Search results. Chrome gave Google insights into how users interacted with search. Side by sides no longer became necessary because Google had direct insight into how users interacted with search results, whether they clicked on a link and immediately left (ie bouncing, this absolutely hurts how Google ranks your site and Google uses it to downrank SEO content farm sites) and what link gave the user the result. This accumulated knowledge and insight from the user's browser is something that no one other than possibly Microsoft could theoretically compete with. Why did I tell this story? Because this article talks about Google's search dominance and doesn't mention Chrome. You cannot talk about one without the other. If you don't mention Chrome, I really question your knowledge on the subject. Disclaimer: Xoogler |
Glad I use Firefox. It works, and while not perfect, is considerably more respectful of my privacy and less misaligned with my interest.