Hacks 86-91

When the Web was was younger, the search engine field was wide open. There were lots of major search engines, including AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and Webcrawler. This proliferation of search engines had both advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage was that you had to make sure you submitted your query to several different places, while an advantage was that you had several inflows of traffic spawned from search engines.

As the number of search engines has dwindled, Google's index (and influence) has grown. You no longer have to worry so much about submitting to different places, but you do have to be aware of Google at all times.