At Rose’s waffle party this Monday, Kyle asked me about what made Google special. I blathered for a minute about various things, but really, my eye was on the prize, and the prize was Kyle’s well-crafted waffles. But so anyway, here’s a more complete answer. I was trying to say something along these lines, but I am no expert. From CNN: The future of online search (Spark’s John Batelle interview) CNN: Google isn’t the only search business, but its name is synonymous with search. How has it done this? JB: It’s certainly not the only one. There were these companies, apart from Google, that were doing the same thing essentially. But the timing wasn’t right, the technology wasn’t right. The moment Google broke out, there were a number of things that happened. One of them was the bubble actually blew up — pieces were all over the ground. But the public, the audience, us, we didn’t stop using the Internet. People stopped making [it] on the Internet, lot of people lost a lot of money in the stock market, but the rest of us kept using the Internet. The portals, the Yahoos, were not worried about search, they were worried about holding you on their sites. They didn’t want you to find something and go over to it. They want you to stay in one place and watch their ads. It turned out that their ads had very little to do with what you might be interested in. Google’s model, which is how they broke out, was that when you put your intention into that box, it would reorganize the page around your intention. If you put the word “minivan” in there, the page would reorganize the advertisements with regards to minivans. Whether there’s cars or whatever would be right […]