The first search engines were created in 1993, google came
along in 1998 after at least two dozen others in that list, and
didn't make a profit till 2001. Some of those early competitors
were giant "billion dollar global companies," yet it's google
that dominates the web search engine market today.
Why is that?
Their original page-rank algorithm. Basically, they found an
efficient way of emulating random clicks to all outgoing links
from a page and thus got better search result rankings.
It was a matter of timing.
