How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

By 1999, usage of the search engine was increasing by as much as 50% a month.15 From 100,000 searches a day at the beginning of that year, Google searches grew to an average of 7 million per day by the end of it.16 Overall traffic to the Google homepage was peanuts compared to the numbers a site like Yahoo was pulling down, but in the case of Google, its users came via word of mouth alone. Not a dime was spent on marketing or promotion. Rave reviews from the media continued to turn people on to the service. The New Yorker said Google was “the default search engine of the digital in-crowd.”17 Time Digital said: “Google is to its competitors as a laser is to a blunt stick.”18 Ordinary users simply told one another about how great and useful Google was. More often than not, users would become Google converts for life.