How did Google become such a popular search engine?
There are several reasons why Google rose to the top and is now the most popular search engine in the world. I would put relevancy of search results as the number one factor followed by the simplicity of its interface. The company spends millions of dollars each year in research and development of better search and indexing algorithms to provide us with cleaner and pertinent results; and this has indeed paid off handsomely. Google’s search engine interface (www.google.com web page) makes it very clear what the company wants to “promote”. Other search engine players like Yahoo!, MSN etc have always had a more “portal” look, pushing several services on the homepage like email, news etc. By the way, Google’s is not the most used search engine in all markets. For example, in China, www.baidu.com is the most popular search engine with a little less than 60% of the share (Quarter 2 of 2007 as per CnetNew.com – www.cnetnews.com.cn/2007/0724/436545.shtml.
