2152 upvotes, 41 direct replies (showing 25)
View submission: Nice one Google
Google was a gamechanger when it first came out. All other search engines were bloated and overloaded. Especially back in the day of modems, you could be at the site you wanted in the time another engine was still loading its front page.
Anyway like all good things, popularity is monetized
Comment by rgramza at 14/08/2022 at 13:50 UTC
545 upvotes, 9 direct replies
For real. Going from using yahoo to Google was absolutely amazing. I still used Yahoo a lot because it had stuff I liked back then, but being able to have a pure search engine was great.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2022 at 14:10 UTC
30 upvotes, 2 direct replies
There's a part of me that still misses AltaVista, though.
Comment by JetScootr at 14/08/2022 at 13:59 UTC
65 upvotes, 3 direct replies
And they didn't have "sponsored results". If you searched for cabbage, you didn't get a raft of ad results for grocery stores.
Comment by HolyAndOblivious at 14/08/2022 at 14:42 UTC
45 upvotes, 8 direct replies
It's not about monetization. Back in the day the big question was : How do we monetize free online services? Google went on ads. They hit a home run. Ir was EXTREMELY profitable. Google search was straightforward, simply the best search engine, that showed you some ads that were very relevant to your search.
Right now, outside of using Google like a Phone book, you get the top 5 results as ads, ads in the side bars, and if you are looking for things like where to download a movie for free, the top 10 results are garbage.
Right now, there are no good search engines except for Bing Videos.
Comment by thanks-doc-420 at 14/08/2022 at 14:43 UTC
24 upvotes, 6 direct replies
Google is still the same as it was back then.
Turns out all that shit is good when intelligently done. If you search for weather, you'll want to see the weather. If you search for movies, you want to see movies. Google isn't bloated because it shows you exactly what's relevant, instead of having a bunch of different crap on the screen guessing you might click on it before you type in a single word.
Comment by Zachs_Butthole at 14/08/2022 at 14:19 UTC
27 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Just google.com is still pretty basic. They don't have ads or anything else except the doodle of the day or whatever. Hasn't really changed much in 20 years.
Comment by jcutta at 14/08/2022 at 14:21 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Best search engine from back in the day was a site called the big hub, it was plain as fuck but it combined the results of Google, yahoo, and a few others. I miss that shit.
Comment by iforgotmymittens at 14/08/2022 at 14:49 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I still think Webcrawler was the best
Comment by ioncloud9 at 14/08/2022 at 15:41 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The worst part is they are using their market position to drive traffic away from sites whose services they’ve decided to bring in house, such as weather, or flights, or answers to questions.
Comment by slater_just_slater at 14/08/2022 at 14:56 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Alta Vista wasn't bad. Could even search newsgroups
Comment by MetsFan113 at 14/08/2022 at 15:26 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I had cable back in 1998... I remember when the tech came to install it and my parents had just bought me a brand new HP computer with an 800 mhz cpu and he was like "damn, you got the Ferrari's of computers right now, its gonna fly with this internet!" I was soooo excited, shortly after that I started playing soldier of fortune then counter strike beta 7... Fuck i feel old....
Comment by JaySayMayday at 14/08/2022 at 14:51 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
That's not true at all. Everyone was using AskJeeves and Dogpile. It was just about which engine featured what we need at the front, Google ended up winning the race especially after introducing image searches
Comment by Aarcn at 14/08/2022 at 14:59 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I remember chrome when it first came out… ah the good days
Comment by Lasekk- at 14/08/2022 at 15:13 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Not everything. VLC?
Comment by moses420bush at 14/08/2022 at 15:25 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Lycos was pretty straight forward iirc
Comment by IndividualPurpose509 at 14/08/2022 at 16:05 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Google was originally funded by the CIA and FBI for surveillance purposes.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2022 at 16:08 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A moment of silence for alltheweb.com. in the initial year or two, was faster and produced more relevant search results.
Comment by nobird36 at 14/08/2022 at 16:17 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yah, they should have just not mad any money. Surely they would still be around.
Comment by unclepaprika at 14/08/2022 at 16:30 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Anyway like all good things, popularity is monetized
Nice one!
Comment by blastradii at 14/08/2022 at 16:35 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”
Comment by Superfluous_Thom at 14/08/2022 at 16:38 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
With the obvious exception of advertising and curation, Google is still relatively pure. Go to bing right now, it's literally just MSN (and i use literally...literally)
Comment by owzleee at 14/08/2022 at 16:42 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It was also the first decent engine for looking up coding problems etc. I was using Alta Isra when Google came out and it really did change everything.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2022 at 16:46 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Google did need a way to make money, or else this wouldn’t have been sustainable
Comment by Pifflebushhh at 14/08/2022 at 17:04 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
How was it so much faster? Just the speed of indexing and the light weight of the page?
Comment by imjesusbitch at 14/08/2022 at 17:11 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Some of the metasearch engines before 1999 were night and day compared to individual web search sites. I remember using Copernic's desktop program for about a year prior to google. Could search through just about every other search engine you wanted to, and it aggregated the results and ranked them. I don't remember there being ads either.
But yeah, google blew them all away with how simple, fast, and reliable it was.
