[gizmo]

> Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing;

Google was revolutionary when it launched. It was clean, super fast, and had way superior search results. It blew the competition away. Within weeks of Google's launch techies started scolding people for using AltaVista or Yahoo, when they should be using something better.

[JKCalhoun]

Oh yeah — who doesn't remember all the "Pamela Anderson" meta tags (thousands) people would put into their HTML files to drive up the page rankings on the various web crawlers.

So easy to game the system before Google. (Now easy again judging by the shitty results I've been getting for years now.)