[My old Sharkbyte partner, David Fischer, recently emailed to say that one of his current tech companies is launching a newsletter, and to ask if I’d saved any of the similar newsletters I wrote back in my tech VC days for inspiration.

Indeed I had. As my ‘bleeding edge’ thinking from 1999 now seems painfully quaint, I thought I’d reprint a few of the editions here over the next few days. First up: the inside scoop on a brand new search engine, Google.]

When users open their browsers, they’re largely doing it to gather news and information. In fact, according to recent research by e-Stats, 87.8% of users engage in information gathering, while around 80% are involved in the loosely related activities of research or surfing. The next categories, like online gaming, chat, and shopping are considerably less popular – 30% or less of web users engage in them.

The common thread in the top three activities – information gathering, research and surfing – is a need for search. Users start out with a vague idea of what they’re looking for, and usually (about 85% of the time) they head straight to a search engine to find what they want. Most of those searchers head to Yahoo, others to Excite or Lycos, while particularly web savvy searchers sometimes head to Metacrawler, which aggregates the results of the top search engines. All of these searches, however, have the same shortcoming – they only search based upon the “relevance” of the page – in essence, the number of times your search terms appears on the page.

Enter Google. Google, along with relevance, uses quality in rating pages. A Google search, then, doesn’t just give you some pages that contain your search terms – it gives you the best pages that contain your search terms. Of course, the web is much too large to rate every page for quality, so Google uses a fairly clever strategy – start with a collection of quality web sites, and define a quality site as one linked to by other quality sites. It might sound circular, but the results are surprising. They’re so good, in fact, that Google has an “I’m feeling lucky” button which takes you directly to the first search result. The algorithm works so well that the first result actually has the information you need the vast majority of the time.

No, we don’t own a stake in Google. But we do watch the web very closely – that’s our job. After seeing how many of our friends still use older search engines, we decided to pass on what we’ve learned. It just might save you a bit of time and sanity.