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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 #!
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 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'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 #!
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.
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.
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!
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
Is that 10, base 2? Come on, folks. Let your innner geek out. It should read:
Google Turns 0x0A
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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.