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Google Turns 10
Ian Lamont writes "It was on September 7, 1998 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc., aiming to provide a better search engine. You can see what it looked like here. Google had a relatively good search engine technology that succeeded in burying many late 1990s competitors, and it eventually developed a successful advertising model and pledged to operate on a 'don't be evil' philosophy. The company now has nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value, and has been acquiring or developing a host of groundbreaking technologies. When did you start using its search engine? Is the world a better place because of Google?"
For those curious, like I was, here are the original Google server pictures missing from the Wayback Machine's archive.
you had me at #!
Xprize, Summer of code, etc. Google is definitely a great company. Sure Gmail is Creepy and they've taken heat for their TOS, but they are still a stand-up, innovative company in my mind. And god-by-every-name bless those guys for their green mindedness and showing its possible for a billionaire corp to do some good.
However, that doesn't mean they won't be next generation's Microsoft. Remember, MS had the little guy advantage for a while, and was innovative and even generous with the charities. But plenty hate them now.
I had a similiar experience. I was always struggling to find somthing at altavista when I heard about google and decided to give it a try. Things that came up at page 65 or whatever on altavista just kept popping on google's first results all the time!
I dropped altavista and never looked back
-- dnl
Google doesn't want you to say Google.
November of 1998 I was doing some y2k testing for the phone company, and one of the long-timers ("the guru" of Unix there) told me about a new search engine he had been using for a few weeks, that rocked his world. Over Christmas I started playing with Google(beta), and eventually quit using anything else.
It's still the best search engine out there, but that's because everyone else has given up. It's nowhere as useful now as it was when it first came out, unfortunately.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Of course this isn't much of a concern for most Slashdot readers these days, but one reason I switched to Google, however many years ago it was, and have kept coming back, has been their consistent consideration for those of us who are occasionally stuck with a slow net connection.
Using Yahoo over dialup is intolerable. By comparison Google's main search page is still lightning fast over a modem. Sure, they'll let you gum it up with all that "iGoogle" clutter if you insist, but if you avoid the eye candy temptations, you'll just get clean, fast, functional design.
And Gmail can be adjusted to have dialup-friendly settings much more easily than any other webmail service I've seen.
I started using Google as my home page because of it's minimal page size. If I opened a browser I was either going to use a bookmark or was going to do a search. Not having to wait for the overhead that the other search engines had was a bonus to search results that were on par with other search engines.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Actually TFA says Google doesn't want people to use, say "googling" as a term for generic searches. As it says, there are serious, by business standards, concerns with using the term. It dilutes the trademark. Xerox had the same problem when people started using "xerox" to mean copying or duplicating. You only xerox on a Xerox machine. I skate with inline skates, the skates are Roller Blades, so when I use them I say roller blading. If the skate were not Roller Blades I wouldn't use the term "roller blading".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Parent was a joke about Google's tracking policies, moderators.
Too bad that Do No Evil has so obviously fallen by the wayside, although the search engine does remain good.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hey google, what about creating a new search type along the lines of 'look for this search only on messageboards and forums'?
Google is good for blogs but like you say I don't think it's that good for message boards or forums. Alta Vista gives me better results there. What I find weird is that when I've done some searches on Google the top results were from About.com, specifically searching on topics about photography and archaeology or anthropology. Google for monte verde and Google's first result is Tom Dillehay on the First People in South America.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Altavista was excellent when it first came out. It had the clean Google-like interface, great coverage, and was very controllable. Then it went to hell and got "Portalized". I remember switching to Google because I had to, and that my initial impression was that Google was inferior to the original Altavista, but at least better than anything available at the time.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Good to it's people? Are you talking about the 75% increase in childcare that they provide (effectively slashing parent's salaries), or the health care benefits that's been in the news because it's worse than that offered by Microsoft, but apparently they decided that the cost of equaling it was too much (then tried to tell employees it's the price of working for such an innovative company)? They're not struggling. They don't need to act that way.
As for the free products they give away - they're always in beta and buggy, they have terms and conditions that mean Google owns or has unlimited license to your data, they're happy to install spyware and crapware that's difficult to remove (like Google update) and they usually buy out the competition.
How do you have difficulty seeing the evil?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
your chronology is incorrect, adSense is from 2004, they bought youtube in 06 and gmail was released later in 04 I don't think adwords is to blame for content less sites, there were plenty before 04 checkout has no startup costs, they cant afford to run checks, I agree this seems risky.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the purple monkey dishwasher
After my geek friend told me of google in autumn of 1998 I quickly abandoned AltaVista for Google. For a few weeks I would do dual searches with both to compare results and to check how Google was stacking up and it quickly became apparent that they were much much better and they had a nicer cleaner search interface. When I did my CS project I remember occasionally using both google and yahoo because they did put different search items near the top 10-20. Occationally Yahoo would throw up something Google hadn't found. But Google always overall had much better hits.
...and ALtavista..., they were great until they started:
+Putting annoying ads(with annoying video and sound!!) in the search page.
+Putting the companies that bought them in the first places of the search results.
+Being slow as snails.
+Difficult advanced search(the first ftpsearch was very, very good, they trashed it), for searching multiple terms you needed to use "Advanced search" and put AND and parenthesis!!!
+Making it a portal instead of searching( TRANSLATION: "We are going to control what you see and do on internet,not you").
I suppose they started listening the economists people in their companies.
One day I discovered google from "searchlores.org", never went back. I always felt it was too good to be true, and expected the day google is being controlled by business mindset people that sinks the company in the long term for getting short term profits(and leaving as heroes and millionaires ) to be near, it will take more time that I thought though.