From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast:
“Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.
4 Comments
…and lack of cruft, and trust.
Freshness mattered, but PageRank meant that Google was immune to the sorts of spam attacks that all other search engines suffered from pretty badly. I’d rank that in importance above size.
Mmm, it helped but it didn’t immunize. A number of search engine optimizers were selling high PageRank links, and of course blog comment spam is a direct attempt to take advantage of PageRank.
I wasn’t suggesting they were immune to all spam attacks (the current controversy about “jew” being on point), but they were immune to the sorts of tricks popular at the time, which made them look a whole lot better without being a whole lot bigger (than AV).