On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:57 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/31 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
On 31/03/2009, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
The Library of Alexandria was with us for between 350 and a thousand years (depending on which history book you read), Wikipedia has been with us for a total of 8.
Yes, and it's been ranked about 8 on the entire freaking internet for a lot of that time! Things that happen relatively early on in the course of something (like the internet) tend to get 'frozen in' and have much longer life than you would expect they could have, google for example is not going away any time soon.
Note that Google came from nowhere, by word of mouth, to become top search engine because of being much better than the other heavily-promoted search engines. Much like Wikipedia's rise to fame.
None of the tools were that well promoted, really - Altavista had been a research experiment that Digital tried to capitalize on, and Yahoo was too stuck on directories / organizing and too little on content. PR as we know it was still very primitive on the net.
But Google did rise by being better.