There’s a reason that Google became one of the world’s largest companies: Its search engine was very good at sending people to other sites.
Those too young to remember the era would find it hard to believe how terrible internet search was in pre-Google times. In the very early days, when there weren’t that many websites at all, curated lists of sites were produced by companies like Yahoo. Then came attempts at mechanically indexing sites, like AltaVista, but those were easily gamed. Then came Google, which figured out that it could use websites’ links to one another to create a metric of importance that then informed its search results. Looking for information about cars? Well, this website about cars is linked by more sites than any other and has the most people vouching for it — so it goes at the top of the list.
