Slashdot Mirror
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 #!
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.
Google AND the Big Lebowski make the scene in that fateful year. Coincidence? Hmm.....
I don't know about Google, but the world is definitely a better place because of the Dude.
Careful What You Wish For....
Of all the search engines, Google was the best name to use as a verb.
"All this time I thought 'Googling yourself' was the other thing."
-- Marge Simpson
I don't know, well before 2002. I'm sure they know the exact date!
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
In late 1999 I heard buzz from my fellow geeks that Google provided amazing results, so I tried it out. Within a couple days, I completely abandoned Alta Vista for Google, and even scaled back bothering with Yahoo because the results were just crazy accurate. I found myself boosting it to friends both of the geek persuasion and not, and everyone liked it. IMO, it was truly a case of a superior product trouncing the competition, the entire point of capitalism. They built a better mouse trap (pun not entirely intended).
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
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.
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 Beta Turns 15
All the really good evil is coded and compiled deep inside the top-secret Google data centers, surrounded by moats filled with sharks with friggin' laser beams on their heads.
Conspiracy theories aside, the data centers are a major innovation, and an area where Google has set standards for its competitors to chase. Google's massively scalable infrastructure is a big part of what has set it apart.
Google? I still visit the Mother Gopher for all my informational needs!
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 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.
I don't know if it's a better world, but I can sure find a lot more stuff a lot easier than ever before.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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 #!
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.
Um...no it's not.
Try 1010.
I'm sure you know that, but I just had to reply to a post with an Invader Zim quote in it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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 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
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
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?
I consider not ever getting email from Daniel Brandt to be one of Gmail's most compelling features.
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.
From where I'm sitting, today is September 5th.
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?
Same here.
One day, when Yahoo was still king, I was having bad luck finding results. I had tried all the search engines I knew about.. Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.
Finally I asked Jeeves for the "best web search" and he recommended Google. Well done, Jeeves!
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.
it was the load speed. While every other search engine/crawler took forever to load a boat load of crap, Google was simple.
Really, does any person outside of Google care if returns .02 seconds faster then a competitor?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... 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 discovered it 1999, in my first job in IT.
I remember one of my colleagues was rather dismissive of it, suggesting that a search engine was only as good as the number of pages it had indexed. Google was new, therefore it couldn't have indexed as many as the others. I started using it anyway.
What I remember is that before google I used to bookmark everything useful I found, so I could be sure of finding it again. After using google for a while I stopped bothering. It was quicker to find a page with google that troll through my huge list of bookmarks.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
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?
Is that 10, base 2? Come on, folks. Let your innner geek out. It should read:
Google Turns 0x0A
Have gnu, will travel.
And I must admit its caught on...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I started using google sometime in 1996, quite possibly shortly after they started in January. I heard about this new search engine, possibly even here on slashdot, and gave it a try.
Before then, I was mostly using Alta Vista. It was ok, but you really had to dig through the results to find what you needed. I remember that time as "all search engines suck, Alta Vista just sucks less".
Then I tried google.stanford.edu and never went back. Literally. Their index was much smaller than Alta Vista at that time, but their results were so much better. Alta Vista had all sorts of garbage on their front page, but that never really bothered me -- it was all about the search results, the cleaner front page was just a side benefit.
So, in response to the previous poster, I would argue that Google *WAS* some sort of a savior. Definitely back in 1996 they were.
Maybe those that came in later like 1998 to 2000 were coming from a much improved Alta Vista than I was, but in 1996 Alta Vista was really quite terrible in comparison with Google.
Sean
I want to try Film Gimp aka CinePaint. But I need a book or something to learn it and I haven't found one. That or someone to show me how to use it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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.
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.
Interesting question: Do you know anyone who doesn't? I personally don't (well, possibly I do, but just don't know that they don't, but I haven't personally witnessed anyone using something else for their web search in a LONG time).
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan