July 21, 2006

Google has existed for : "We all love Google, but do you remember what life was like before Google? I know that is seems like a while ago, but it wasn't that long ago:" The Faq

I like the new months: Lucky - after the "I'm feeling Lucky" button (31 Days) Orkut - after the Google Social Network, and a Google Engineer (28/29 Days) GMail - which we all know is the mail program provided by Google (31 Days) Froogle - the shopping service provided by Google (30 Days) Page - after Larry Page, one of the founders of the company who developed the original search algorithms (31 Days) Brin - after Sergey Brin the other founder of the company who developed the original search alogirthm (30 Days) Page-Rank - the algorithm the search engine uses (31 Days) BackRub - the original name of their search engine (31 Days) Query - the things we submit to Google! (30 Days) Ad Word - Googles mechanism of generating ad revenue (31 Days) Picasa - The photo organizer/viewer that Google bought and now maintains (30 Days) Blogger - The blogging software that Google bought and now maintains (31 Days)

posted by glamajamma 18 years ago
  • so the first day of christmas is now the 21st day of froogle?
  • I remember using the web before a couple of guys set up a (hand-edited, non-searchable) directory at http://yahoo.stanford.edu/ Prior to that, I was still far more impressed with all the great information you could find in one place using Gopher or WAIS. As far as I'm concerned, Google is still a baby, yet it certainly has changed my life.
  • Absolutely. And wikipedia is heading the exact same way. (Although one must never cite it as an authority, but rather replace "wikipedia says" with "some guy says".) But the gmail thing was totally liberating, what with its being logical and all.
  • It's solved many arguments between hubby and me.
  • Buy 4 Google Jan 2008 $175 put options at the ask price of $4.60.
  • Pets.com
  • I seem to remember the days of multiple competing search engines; altavista, yahoo, bigfoot, lycos, excite, infoseek, hotbot. You'd have 6 or so of 'em in your bookmarks & use each one for its own particular area of best returned result. You'd have to trawl thru pages of the same results on different engines to find variant documents on whatever you were looking for. Globs of information from different fields used to be sectioned off in different 'areas' of the web, in other words, sites devoted to particular issues. If you wanted to search for something from history or literature or medicine, you'd have to trawl edu sites or link farms devoted to that kind of stuff alone. Everything was portioned up into different areas of research. Occasionally you'd find a goldmine only to come back a few months later to find it gone. In those days we relied heavily on the webheads who collected vast pages of links on every conceivable topic in order to find data of value, or upon rare, short-lived, subsidised 'portals'. To a certain extent Google has made us rather weak, on the other hand it has made information otherwise obscure available to everyone regardless of their websavvy. In the old days, internet arguments could be decided by the size of one's bookmark file & the ability to sniff out directories quickly, alone. These days, the ability to parse relevant data from inaccurate or false sources plus an understanding of how to debate & present that information coherently is much more important, which of course is a great improvement & super valuable on an educational level for all of us, not just cliquey, isolated little groups.
  • I remember when I had to sit around wondering things, and spending long nights cursing my poor memory. Ah, well. Better go churn some butter and smear some goose grease on the axles of my high perch phaeton.
  • I remember in 2000 trying to convince someone Google was better than Metacrawler. Every once and a while I will go look up the old search engines and see what happened to them. hotbot, webcrawler, altavista, (remember when altavista wasn't at altavista.com?) I keep looking for something better than google, simply because I can't believe that in all these years nothing better has come along, but still haven't found anything better. ask.com and the new windows live search are ok, but still, not good enough to make me a switcher. a9.com (which is now powered by Windows live search) gives you 1.57% off at amazon if you use it semi-often. That doesn't sound like much, but combine it with their ads which i put on my blog and then click on to get another 3-5% off and my Amazon credit card with basically gives you 3% cash back on Amazon purchases and it adds up!
  • Metaspy was cool though. Or is. I dunno.
  • People who use search engines are IDIOTS. All you have to do is keep working through the possible URLs until you find the right one - www.a.com, www.b.com, www.c.com ... it's simple. IDIOTS.
  • I remember AltaVista back in 1999, when it began sucking. Somehow my business websites randomly began vanishing and reappearing in their system... needless to say I welcomed my new Google overlord.
  • Actually, I've found that Altavista's image search finds hits that don't show up on google. I use mamma.com and dogpile.com for met-searches.
  • I was just thinking about this during a long drive to a faraway ATM today, how older search engines worked, how finding stuff on the web used to be a crapshoot, and the ways Google has changed how we look for things. I used to love hotbot. I obviously need to take along better CDs to listen to...
  • funny search engines found, ironically enough, using Google.
  • One of the best things about Google was that it didn't use meta tag keywords and descriptions to rank their results like most of the other search engines did. Rest in hell meta tags.