Members of our nominating committee explain why they chose search capabilities, as embodied by Google, to be among their personal “7 Wonders of the Internet.”
George Grenley: Google. What can I say? Google is now a verb, and is essential. There may be a better search engine than Google some day, but whatever it is, it will be the wonder of the world. I’ll go so far as to say that Google is so far in the lead as a Wonder of the Web that the rest of these items should be numbered 12 through 17, not 2 thru 7.
Jim Albright: Search engines – I doubt the Internet would have grown to a fraction of its current “size” if the only way to find a resource was to already know it existed and where to locate it. In my opinion search engines are the glue that binds the Internet together.
Jack Miller: Google – I use it several times a day and I am still amazed. My primary research tool for everything.
Paul Hoffman: Google — It started with “search for Web content” (which it did better than anyone at the time), but became “how I find anything” in under five years. FWIW, I’m talking about Google the service, not Google the company, which has the potential for becoming the DEC of the 2010s.
John Gog: The Google Search engine – Not “Google” as a whole. For its flaws and controversies concerning ads, the Google engine changed finding information on the Internet forever. A nod should go to its ancestor Alta Vista that set the early standard for search.
Derek Rainwater: Yahoo! (Steadfast, adapting and changing with the times, “Old Faithful,” Survivor).
Alan Portman: Google. Google has become de facto for ‘search the Internet’. The fact that Google has kept its’ “core”, web searching clean of its other ventures is the key to its success. Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Infoseek, and Ask Jeeves all got so bogged down with advertiser content and other services that they lost the ability to be a search engine.
(And the honorable mentions are here.)
