"when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me.

The real problem in searching is how to sort the results. In defense of the computer scientists, this is something nobody even noticed until they starting indexing gigantic corpora the size of the Internet.

But somebody noticed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin over at Google realized that ranking the pages in the right order was more important than grabbing every possible page. Their PageRank algorithm is a great way to sort the zillions of results so that the one you want is probably in the top ten. Indeed, search for Joel on Software on Google and you’ll see that it comes up first. On Altavista, it’s not even on the first five pages, after which I gave up looking for it."

- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-...