Google, Inc.: Searching for New Avenues for Growth

With the growth of the Internet, there was a felt need among users for a search mechanism to get the information they sought from websites. One of the pioneers of search services was Yahoo!ⁱⁱⁱ Inc., which used human editors to sort websites. As Internet usage exploded, this human-powered search proved inadequate. AltaVista, a search engine, deployed computer programs called spiders or crawlers that checked various websites and listed the relevant ones. The relevance of the web pages and their ranking was based on the frequency of keyword occurrence. But this process, in many cases, threw up irrelevant results. For instance, in a search for Oracle, the pages of vendors of Oracle products might rank above Oracle Corporation's website as the vendor pages might feature many Oracle products.