Why is Google So Popular?

In the most basic sense, Easley and Kleinberg's "Power Laws and Rich-Get-Richer Phenomena" explains that websites become popular because other sites link to them, and the growth of a site's popularity depends on its current popularity. The article mentions several of the most popular websites, such as Amazon and Wikipedia. Amazon is arguably the internet's biggest shopping website, and Wikipedia is arguably the internet's biggest open-sourced encyclopedia. However, the article also mentions Google, the internet's biggest search engine, which got me thinking. If one wants to shop online, he or she is probably going to be sent to Amazon. If one is looking for information on basically anything, he or she is probably linked to either Wikipedia or a smaller, fan-run wiki, which is basically a knowledge hub for a specific topic using Wikipedia's engine, but not run by Wikipedia itself. However, people don't search for a search engine like Google.

Google is seen by most as a search engine, as around 99% of their profits come from advertisements in search results, so unless people are looking for other Google related products, such as Google Maps, Google Chrome, or Android, people won't typically search for Google. Google is primarily a source of outgoing links, so since Google isn't a site that is particularly in-linked to, it shouldn't be popular according to Easley and Kleinberg's research. Although the power laws mentioned in the article are valid, Google, the internet's most popular website, shouldn't be seen as a paradox. Instead, one must see that the number of in-links to a site isn't the only judge of its popularity.