Hey, it's Google's birthday! Remember when they were the good guys? Google is celebrating its 21st birthday today – old enough to buy its own celebratory pint in many states in the US. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University and officially launched the site in 1998. This was preceded by a variety of soft launches but the company chooses September 27 as its official birthday. …
I remember using Yahoo!’s tree structure to find websites (yes kids, it was like the whole WWW on one page!) and then moved to AltaVista which HAD A SEARCH BOX!
The first time I saw Google I was completely seduced by the all-white page and lack of clutter (Yahoo! by now a portal, still trying to corral accès to the whole web through one page). However, the real magic was the accuracy of the results Google produced back then, it seemed mind-readingly spooky.
Obviously I’ve since moved on and now use a blend of ddg and Qwant
"Google search result quality has fallen a great deal from those heady days."
Back in those heady days, web pages tended to have useful information on them. I wonder how much of the poor results is due the billions upon billions of pages now on the WWW, the vast majority of which are useless vacuous crap if not downright wrong or fake?
Perhaps, but I personally saw the search results drop noticeably once Google started "personalizing" search results, and it has continued declining ever since. I haven't seen other search engines suffering a drop in search result quality (in fact, they're mostly improving, albeit slowly).
As a result, I'm not so sure that this has much to do with the size of the web.
> I fondly remember that accuracy. Google search result quality has fallen a great deal from those heady days.
I simply don't believe you. I remember a time where I often needed to go to the third page of results to find what I was looking for. I would bet that now 99% of users never see the second page.
Altavista was awesome in its day. Then it started trying to become a "portal" (remember those? - everyone wanted to be one in the mid-90s), and here we are.
Google, on the other hand - they've actually pulled off the "portal" transition without dying horribly. True that it's done horrible things to the quality of their service, but hats off to them - they've achieved what Altavista and others never did.
I mainly used Alta Vista in the old days, I think Yahoo! for a short while, but AV was head and shoulders above the competition, when it arrived.
But back then the 'net was small enough that you didn't need a search engine for common sites. I first used Mosaic for browsing, then Netscape. I remember going to a Microsoft event on web, where they introduced IE4, taking the CD back home and finding that it was an unreliable POS that crashed on every second page load... When it worked, it was fast, but it was just too unstable.
Using IE became inevitable though, towards the end of the 90s. I quickly switched to Pheonix, sorry, Firebirs, erm, I mean Firefox from its first beta release. 2015/16 I dallied with Edge and Chrome for a bit, but quickly switched back to Firefox.
I use DuckDuckGo for most of my searches these days.
I started with AltaVista then went to Lycos, for some reason I can't remember. I then used a meta search program that I can't remember the name of (Windows program with, I think, a nautical name). That program was slooooooowww to produce results, but they were very good (subject to accurate search terms!). A friend suggested that I try Google, but the minimal frontend made me think that it was unfinished, and I didn't go any further with it (I was working on a dissertation at the time, and didn't need the hassle of a half-baked search engine). My friend then asked me for a search term (this was 1998-99, so it would have been on some aspect of the Citizens' Income), and put it in Google using natural language ("Errrm - whatchadoin'...?") - he got better results than my meta-engine in significantly less time (the little bar that told you how long the results took was amazing!), and I was sold immediately. The trouble is, I still am...
Now that I think of it (this was a long time ago, my memory fades)...
Altavista was my main go-to. But more often than not, I'd use multiple search engines when looking for something, as each search engine seemed to have a different pool of websites in their databases.
This was what made Google so attractive to me when it came around -- it could come up with the results I'd otherwise need to use 4 or 5 search engines to find.
I think the beginning-of-the-end date can be pinpointed to the moment the ads started running. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with advertising, but the way it started with the list of unobtrusive hyperlinks by the side of search results and evolved into the situation now where many searches are becoming almost completely useless, due to the amount of people trying to sell you something swamping the information you are trying to look up quickly is pretty much the history of Google search. The first company to be able to effectively filter out all the search optimised commercial crap from useful information could be a real threat. But they would probably end up going down the same route eventually.
It could be, but frankly I doubt it. It's a pretty easy thing to take an idea you think is good, develop it, and try to push it out. When you get lucky and the idea takes off without a lot of painful effort, you can be dragged along in the tide. I think that Google probably started like this, and it was only when their incoming wave started picking up other junk that they started to realize that this could go in a number of directions. At that point, they found the easy way to make money, and discarded the original spirit that we saw in that whole "Don't be evil" thing.
"I remember when Google was a force for good. If only they had stayed that way -- but I guess that was too much to hope for."
Like kids, they start off sweet and innocent. Then comes the Terrible Teens. Back in the day, reaching 21 would be the time we'd expect them to grow and mature, becoming responsible. But here in the ealry years of the 21st century, it seems many don't leave home, get jobs and grow up until their late 20's early 30's. We might have a decade or more before Google grows up.
I dated a 21 year old when I was old enough to be her father. She stated that to me, and I replied, 'Aye that is true, where was your mother living in 1985?' so she punched me hard on my jaw. She said her mum was part of the nude dance in Wickerman and I replied I'd masturbated over her as a child. She went to punch me again but I was expecting it by then and she missed.
I tried to explain what life was like before electronic beeps which are ubiquitous today. And her approach to our sex life was more akin to a porn video than anything I'd experienced at her age. She said she couldn't ever imagine a female leader of the Labour party, and I explained that nobody saw Margaret Thatcher becoming PM, not even herself.
I'm celibate now, but I stress this is voluntary and both me and womankind have made peace with it. I still love women, just don't want the stress of the horror of sexual intercourse. [Trivia: The Horror of Sexual Intercourse was the working title of the first Del Amitri album, later named eponymously]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6esIX45fI
Here is a party full of my friends
And here is a cup being filled up to be drunk again
We are just starting luxurious lives
To be drunkards and diddymen
Making gulf wars and battered wives.
Now I may be pleading
But there's no love nor fear in my eyes
Just greediness
I'm not seeing this sleeping dog lie.
As a young student I'd a mate who was obsessed with that early incarnation of del Amitri - Hammering Heart, Sticks & Stones etc. Had a few of their songs on compilation tapes, as you do, then forgot about them for years, then much more recently during a spell of slightly intoxicated nostalgia went and bought it online[1]. Musically it stands up very well, but the lyrics... let's just say they've not dated too well.
[1] there's your IT angle
Indeed.
I remember when that acquisition happened. Doubleclick was a pretty awful company, and I actually thought that it might be possible that Google could do it better. And, for a while, they did -- but it didn't last. It's almost as if Doubleclick's corpse was infectious and Google caught the disease.
I remember running around all the other people in the desktop support team I was in raving about this new search engine. When I first used it it was still in beta but even then it knocked its competitors into a cocked hat.
Alas how things have changed. I would not touch Google with a barge pole and try as far as possible to keep my data out of their clammy clutches. Though this is getting harder and harder.
Now I use Duckduckgo running under Palemoon, it may not keep Google at bay but it is a start.
I did. I'm sad to say so, but I did. It was in the 2000s. I was younger, prone to assigning things to good and evil boxes or at least along a one-dimensional sliding scale, and Google played right into the good box. They were developer focused, or appeared that way. They released a bunch of things as open source. They took action to make SEO less useful and keep search results relevant, and they succeeded quite often. When someone tried to break the internet with stupid legislation or proprietary standards, Google used their influence as a big tech place to inform the relevant parties that that would not be happening. I still don't know how much of their descent was already in action at that time, but I like to believe that they were once the way I remember them. It gives me some nostalgia while I remove more of their current tech from my devices.
For megalomaniacal values of "good", perhaps. Seriously, normal people aren't narcissistic enough to purchase personal 767 aircraft ... not even very rich ones.
But that's OK, at least they do no evil. Oh, wait, they dropped even that pretense, didn't they?
I never used google. Instead, there was altavista, then metacrawler, now DDG ... google has always rubbed me the wrong way. Gives me the willies, it does.
The key selling point about the original google was its quick and decluttered web interface. At the time, altavista had turned into a huge bloated soup of banner ads and tables.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Altavista-1999.png
I remember the time. Google came on the seen just as Altavista was switching to pay to display, which almost overnight guaranteed that Google produced more relevant results and, with the VC backing, was able to turn that ability to produce relevant results into something it could sell. This success engendered the Silicon Valley VC model that sees network effects and monopolies above anything else.
I've always seen Google as just another US technology company. However, so far, I don't think it has yet reached the heights of abuse that in their time, AT&T, IBM and Microsoft have, and that Oracle and SAP currently enjoy. I expect it to bend, and occasionally even break, the rules. But I'm also repeatedly surprised at their long term to commitment to some ideas (YouTube was one big and expensive bet) and engagement in standards work even beyond their own narrow agenda.
Overall, I think we're lucky that Page and Brin maintained so much control of the company. I shudder to think what Google would have become if the VCs had gained control: some kind of Frankenstein mix of Uber and Facebook, no doubt.
"I think we're lucky that Page and Brin maintained so much control of the company."
I do think that their control delayed the decline of Google for a long time, but in the end, I don't think it mattered. I don't think Google now is any better than it would have been if the VCs had control.
Indeed.
Looking at recent reports about malicous Android apps shows that the majority of them are commiting ad-fraud by clicking on unseen ads on users devices and using virtualization and heavy obfuscation and timed execution to avoid detection.
I would bet that the amount of ad-fraud on mobile devices is much, much higher than anyone suspects.
I too recall moving from Yahoo! to AltaVista, to Google, and being honestly astonished how the latter always seemed to find exactly the page that I needed. Yes, it was that good.
As years went by I added any number of Google products to my on-line life, and was generally very happy.
Then, maybe ten years ago, they started killing off great tools and services with no particular sense of caring that this would actually hurt people. Products like Gmail started getting interface "updates" that actually made them less useful and more annoying. Android seemed to become more annoying with every version, burying users under a torrent of notifications while locking out things that are actually pretty much essential for some people. At the same time Google demands repeatedly that I do things by yelling "OK Google" at my phone pr computer.
And, irony of ironies, Google Search has become nearly useless, with sponsored ads, shopping sites, and entirely irrelevant things taking over the first page of results.
The one Google product that might still be top of the list is Maps, but they've made the maps so low contrast that they're often un-readable. There's actually a plug-in that specifically adds contrast so you can see streets and names.
This is the year that I've actually moved most of my life out of Google, partly because of the data collection and sale of my information, and partly because so many of their products just don't deliver what is promised. NextCloud, Thunderbird, and my web host's email service cover most things, and arguably do it better than Google.
At this point the only products that I actually choose to use, and am generally happy with, are nice stable Open Source ones like Mint Linux and LibreOffice. I'm tired of battling some corporate code geek's idea of what would be the next Kewl Thing to foist on users. I don't want novelty, I want to get my work done.
It's sad, but I'm happy to just avoid Google at all costs.
Also Google News, which was once quite good. Went bonkers some years ago, and stayed that way despite thousands upon thousands of negative posts about it (and nary a good post).
You bring up GMail: Terrible UI (so is Outlook's webmail, but in different ways). Whose stupid idea was it to make the '#' key the delete key? Did that person even know where the # key is? Of course you can mouse the garbage can icon, but I not infrequently click the garbage can on the wrong line, deleting the wrong mail. I have to use GMail (my university was seduced by the dark side a year ago), but I pull it up on my home computer using Thunderbird. A much happier "experience".
In sum (and agreeing with you), I find that Google doesn't care about its users; it cares about its advertisers. Which I suppose is to be expected.
Crikey, yes, Google News went from a summary of current affairs with direct links to pages showing as many variants of a story as possible to some curated mess that's terribly laid out and promotes only approved sources.
When you're used to seeking conflicting views on a topic the change was very painful.
"Also Google News, which was once quite good."
Yes, it was quite sad when Google effectively destroyed Google News. But it got me to stop using it, which was probably for the best anyway.
At this point, the only Google service I use anymore is YouTube -- and even with that, I only use it on a tablet that is not used for anything else. Google is a company that is best kept at arm's length.
Methinks the perception is what's really changed.
I first came to google as a search engine for Usenet, 'cos they bought dejanews. What they did to dejanews and usenet is surely a strong candidate for the most evil thing they've ever done, and it dates back right to the beginning (a case I argue here).
On the Web, what was good about Google compared to Altavista (IMHO the best of the rest when google first appeared) wasn't the content of the results. Rather it was a presentation free of the graphical clutter that got in the way of the results and added cup-of-coffee-length delays to simple search on the information dirt-track of the era.
Many years ago I used to use Copernic Desktop Search which searched all of the then search engines, Yahoo!, Lycos, Hotbot etc.
It worked well although you did get a lot of duplicated results.
It seems to have disappeared now (well it used to be free now a paid for product and only seems to search locally (ie company network rather than WWW)
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