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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?"
I started using Google when it bought Deja News which was the only good place to find a broad selection of technical information on the web. I guess I just defaulted to Google as a search engine after that.
how bad search really was before Google. For that matter it's easy to forget that it used to take work to find information at all. Our culture has just barely begun to come to terms with how revolutionary this change really is.
/...
Google started off running on Stanford equipment, and was spun off, as happens frequently at Stanford. Sun and Cisco also started with Stanford people and equipment.
Stanford has become a real estate company and a venture capital firm that runs a university on the side for the tax break. It's working out very well; they now have $21.6 billion in investment assets, including a big chunk of Google. This started around 1991, when the financial management operation was spun off as a separate company. The financial operation invests in venture pools, which in turn fund venture capitalists, which fund startup companies, some of which become big. They can draw on expertise from the academic side to help evaluate investments. It's working quite well; annualized returns for the past decade were 15.1%. Tax free!
Agreed. Search engines were horrible back then, and google was no exception (for me, anyway). It was about a year and a half after they debuted that I started using them, and I haven't looked back.
As for the 'do no evil' part, I find it funny that the people who hate google so badly still use it. They're so much better than the competition that the people who hate it come up with convulted methods to try to use it without their information getting tracked.
And if you're ever in Mountain View, CA, you can see one the first production server racks from 1999, as well as the Lego (actually Duplo) blocks that housed the original 1998 beta server shown in your link.
The artifacts can be viewed by the public at the Computer History Museum, along with everything from a Difference Engine, an Enigma machine, parts of ENIAC, numerous Crays, a restored and working PDP-1, an Apple I, and pretty much everything else you can imagine.
No visit to the Bay Area is complete without a trip to the Computer History Museum.
I've been there once. The tour docent was fairly knowledgeable too.
I just hope they're concentrating on the old stuff more than Web 1.0.
you had me at #!
My favorite thing about Google is the unique logos marking special occasions. Sadly, they don't seem to consider today special enough.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I can't believe how you've grown! Why it seems like only yesterday. . .
Literally. This internet thing is growing up so fast!
Dang. There are actually net-savvy kids out there now who never lived in a world without Google. Think about that!
When did years start to fly by like this? I'm amazed.
-FL
I really have no idea, but lemme check. You expect me to remember things like this?
Remember Yahoo's big ad campaign to become a verb. No one Yahoos, everyone Googles
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
... but I'm not too impressed. Google profits from the ease of separating advertisers from their money, not from the relatively meager output of their 20000 employees.
For each and every thing Google offers, decent alternatives exist. Even if Google search would disappear, the void would be filled quickly. The same second source effect applies a fortiori to their shady advertisement business, Gmail and the hodgepodge of unrelated, discretionary, copycat and so-so bits and pieces.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Google would become irrelevant in the next decennium.
I'm not a coward by any name.
I, for one, try to use Google as seldom as possible. They know too much (cue Pablo Francisco voiceover... ;) Seriously, the Google corporation is really, really clever in the way they market themselves to the public eye. Don't be evil and all that stuff; to work for them, supposedly, is an incredible experience, cool and whatnot... unlike other companies. Sort of like a Google Distortion Field that surrounds them. Their recent success with the Chrome browser is an excellent example for their successful marketing. But if you really think about all the information the Google corporation is collecting, you should be afraid, you should be VERY afraid!
;o)
To give you an idea check out this video from a presentation at toorcon by Steven Rambaw titled "Privacy is Dead - Get over it", ironically hosted at Google (Youtube has it, too, BTW): http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-383709537384528624 The presentation does NOT specifically deal with Google, but the big G get's its mention, of course. Whatever you might think about Rambam or Google or anything else concerning internet & privacy, for that matter, I really recommend you to sit down and take the time to watch this video. It's about two hours long, but really enlightening, even if you already have a general grip on things concerning privacy in today's highly networked world.
Returning to tha G, nowadays I try to use alternatives wherever I can (Meta: ixquick.com, clusty.com, Sroogle.org [Yes, despite it's owner], etc). When I still used to use Google regularly I noticed that sometimes I even found results through other search engines, like Yahoo, that Google simply didn't know about, specifically in relation to Japanese websites. They're not that good, after all. (NOTE: Not that Yahoo is any better than Google. They're every bit as hungry for information as everyone else in this business.)
So, when did YOU stop using Google?
Oh god, they too used to have an exclamation mark in their brand name!
It looks weird. It sounds weird in your head. And it totally! messes up the readability of texts. Just imagine you have to write an article about Google! considering Yahoo! might be a good acquisition target!
So why on earth did everyone do that in the nineties? And why has no one told the marketing departments of this world that the nineties are over?
Then again, as a personal entity with no stake in these corporate entities, I could care less about their trademark protections.
I used to write and there's not many things that will get a published writer slapped with a lawsuit faster than to use a trademark as a verb, or in the case of Coca Cola as a pronoun for a generic drink. In my writing classes and in the writing clubs or groups I was a member of this was pretty regularly stressed. A regular person on the streets, or on /. doesn't have to be concerned but someone who writes for a living certainly does.
Anyway, just about everyone uses Google nowadays, so it's usually going to be technically correct to say "googling".
According to TFA not quite 2/3 of searches are done with Google. I wouldn't say that that's "just about everyone". I don't use Google for all of my searches either, most but not all. I also use About.com, Alta Vista, Ask.com, and Dmoz (Open Directory Project).
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The problem with Google is that their "don't be evil" claim is hard to take seriously any more. Ads at the right of search results weren't too bad, but then it went downhill. They created the "content-related ad" industry, which resulted in a vast number of "made for AdWords" junk sites and blogs, the "domaining" industry, and a vast amount of crap. Even real advertisers don't like it; the smarter ones opt out of the Google Content Network and stick with the search result ads.
From there it went downhill. Google doesn't do much to qualify their advertisers, and as we point out occasionally, about 35% of them are "bottom feeders", where you can't even identify the real business behind the ad.
Then there's Google Checkout. They accept very marginal businesses. They ought to be doing the kind of validation a bank does of its clients, but clearly, they don't.
Google's real problem is that they went public at the top of their game. Google was #1 in search when they went public, so they couldn't grow in their main business area. They had to expand to justify their high P/E ratio, and none of their expansion areas (YouTube, GMail, etc.) made money. So they had to figure out how to get more revenue per search result. At that point they started to turn to the dark side.