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Happy 7th Birthday Google!

AviN456 writes "On this day, in 1998, Google was born. Seven years later, and it has not only become the most popular search engine on the internet, but it has also become an integral part of many people's online life. From Google search to Google mail, Google Earth to Google Moon. It has even made its way into language as a common word.It is quite undeniable. Google is an amazing achievement. Happy birthday Google, and here's to many many more!"

25 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. I knew it by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Funny

    As soon as I saw that png on Googles website, I KNEW Slashdot would cover it. I thought to myself "Google farted, that sound you hear is a million Slashdotters sniffing."

    Seriously, thanks for gmail though. I wish I would apply the concept of labels to files on my harddisk.

    1. Re:I knew it by @madeus · · Score: 4, Informative

      Seriously, thanks for gmail though. I wish I would apply the concept of labels to files on my harddisk.

      Woah, seriously your OS doesn't have that? Time to upgrade perhaps. :-)

      It's not a feature I use (especially since having Spotlight), though I used to rely on it quite a bit when I was using Mac OS Classic. Nautilus allows you to label files though, and KDE seem to have something interesting in the works.

    2. Re:I knew it by gowen · · Score: 5, Funny
      Google farted, that sound you hear is a million Slashdotters sniffing.
      The sound you hear is a million slashdotters explaining how it's the most fragrant smell ever, and that there's no way any of the traditional perfumiers could possibly come up with anything so great.

      "It's hard to delete mail in Gmail"
      "You don't want to delete mail" (waves hand mysteriously while speaking like Alec Guiness.)

      "I want to sort my mail into folders"
      "That's not the feature you're looking for.... Labels are much more flexible."
      "And slinkys are more flexible than towbars, but I know which one I want to use to tow my car"
      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    3. Re:I knew it by xtracto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On a news post that does not yield too much discussion...

      do we still hate GIF's even if the patent has expired?

      It is not about hating GIF, I think most of us do not hate technology at all, I think we never hated GIF, we hated the patent and the company behind it.

      In the same way, (i think) we hate Microsoft, but we (at least I) do not hate Windows, or Office, those are just (from the technology POV) demonstrations of what we can achieve with technology, with good and bad things, or good and bad applications. Or like the Atomic bomb, we do not hate the technology, we hate the people that used to kill a hell lot of humans.

      In that way, and going ontopic, nowadays, we love google, because they are making excellent technology, their search page, their email client, their maps etc. Of course they where not the first in ANY of these technologies, and they are not the only ones, but they are making it in a right way (notice it is not the only "teh righ t way"). Although on these more recent days, I have seen that some "do a bit of evil" karma has been sliding into Google, and even if Google starts to be Evil with E as in "MS" we may start to hate it but gmail or google local will continue to be a great technology.

      Althoug you may not believe it, there is people that hate google (to some degree) as for example some of the Adsense buyers (the REAL google customers) because the not so fair google behaviour on that side (yep... has some kind of monopoly over there, but again it does not means we HATE the adsense technology).

      This is the so called "information age" and, Google is playing a big part on it. Google will stay alive for a lot of more year, and IMHO will become as influential as IBM once was to technology (in the days of the Big Blue). We only need to hope that it stays doing "just a bit of evil".

      Happy birthay!

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
    4. Re:I knew it by DrHanser · · Score: 4, Informative

      WinFS is available as an add-on to Windows XP.

      --
      What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
    5. Re:I knew it by mwilli · · Score: 4, Informative

      Correction, it WILL be available as an add-on to Windows XP. It is currently still in MSDN beta testing phase.

      --
      My sig beat up your sig.
    6. Re:I knew it by DJStealth · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here's a preview of what google looked like 7 years ago

      I know archive.org had older versions of the page, but for some reason this is the oldest one I can get today. You can try this link to an older preview, but it doesn't seem to work for me anymore.

  2. I for one... by bc90021 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...welcome our seven year old overlords.

    By ten, I predict that we're calling it the "GoogleNet" instead of the "Internet". ;-)

    1. Re:I for one... by ZakuSage · · Score: 4, Funny

      I predict that by ten we'll be calling Google "Skynet".

  3. And many more... by Silverlancer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here's to hoping google will be here for its next 7 years... and that it will still abide by its motto.... :)

    1. Re:And many more... by CardiganKiller · · Score: 5, Funny

      Google and Micrsoft in "The Big Lebowski". Google: "Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not "A Multinational Corporation". You're a Multinational Corporation. I'm the Goog. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Googleness, or uh, Googler, or El Googlerino if you're not into the whole brevity thing."

  4. Happy Birthday to Lawsuit by xmuskrat · · Score: 5, Funny

    Too bad I can't sing them a birthday song without invoking a lawsuit.

    --
    activestudios web design
    1. Re:Happy Birthday to Lawsuit by BandwidthHog · · Score: 5, Funny

      I know a good voice coach if you’re really that worried.

      --

      Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
  5. Also known as... by toupsie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The day Altavista died. It's amazing how fast and how hard Google crushed all the other search engines.

    --
    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
    1. Re:Also known as... by Mac+Degger · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not really. It's still the case that different search engines excel in different areas. For real scientific papers/issues dealing not just with electronics, teoma.com is better than google. Althoug googles scientific paper search engine is now very helpfull aswell. But for hard to find things, a metacrawler is still better than just google.

      It's a myth perpetuated by the ignorant that google has 'crushed' all other search engines. And as soon as google only gives adsense'd websites on a search, or useless marketing pages, all users will flock to the next search engine. So I'm not too sure what your point was, but it is not tue :)

      --
      -- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
  6. together we will rule the galaxy as father and son by Errandboy+of+Doom · · Score: 5, Funny

    Doesn't someone else have a birthday around this time of year?

    Here's hoping Google stays hip at 30.

  7. Re:Why announce 7th? by space_dude_27 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe they have a birthday every year.

  8. Google's lego server by Understudy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the early servers for Google was made from Lego blocks.
    http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures /display/0-4-Google.htm

  9. Something is very wrong here! by Vengie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google's official birthday is September 7th.... (Link is to Google Cache. Otherwise, first hit for "google birthday" and check the cache.....)

    --
    When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
  10. Re:Why announce 7th? by y2dt · · Score: 5, Funny

    "7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby."
    -Hitchhiker, There's Something About Mary

  11. In other news by TCM · · Score: 4, Funny

    Google has been renamed to Googte!

    --
    Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
  12. Only 38 posts... by garethwi · · Score: 4, Funny

    Only 38 posts and their site is already... oh wait.

  13. Nine Billion Names of God by kjeldor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    by Kathy Kachelries

    After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke Id already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.

    Let me ask you something, the man said. I didnt argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think youre interested.

    Have you ever created a web site?

    I shook my head.

    Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?

    Nope.

    What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didnt even have an AOL site or something?

    Do I look like an AOL user to you? For the record, I dont think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. Im sure I have something, somewhere, I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.

    You know what Google is?

    Yes, I said. I was running low on patience.

    No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?

    Reluctantly, I shook my head.

    You ever meet anyone who worked for them?

    Dont think so.

    You havent. Nobody works for them anymore.

    I shrugged, and took the mans empty pint. I didnt offer to refill it.

    Theyre self-contained. Its all automated, in there. Its underground.

    I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. Why dont you eat something? I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.

    Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works, he said, but didnt want for a response. They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when youre searching, youre not even searching the internet.

    Ive heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. Same thing, though, I said.

    You ever wonder why Google doesnt cache its own searches?

    They program around it.

    No. Thats what you think. Thats what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyones got one of those, right? But Google doesnt forget. Googles studied that thing so many times that its studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that its bigger than the internet?

    Its still a part of the internet, though.

    No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.

    The man had a point. I nodded.

    Heres the thing. Google has memorized who you are. Its memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And whats more important, its memorized its own idea of you. Google is omniscient. Its omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, thats when Google realized what it was.

    Gradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. You think its sentient.

    I know its sentient.

    How?

    He smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. Me and Google go way back. But what Im saying is, he continued, It knows us. All of us. It is us.

    For the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.

    Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. Its one of the nine billion names of God.

  14. Re:Come on folks by BandwidthHog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is anyone else getting tired of watching Slashdot chase Google's tail?

    Umm, that’s not a tail.

    --

    Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
  15. Wha? It's not International Cake Day? by Cerdic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Damn, I was making all these cakes because I thought it was International Cake Day. Google always lets me know when to celebrate some holiday I'm not familiar with (Like Bastille Day). Now I just look like an idiot. An idiot with a bunch of cakes.

    --
    Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.