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Google Turns 10
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Sep 05, 2008 03:53 PM
from the we'll-always-be-older-and-poorer dept.
from the we'll-always-be-older-and-poorer dept.
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?"
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pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Re:pictures (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, until I looked at those pics I didn't realise 'Google!' was an anagram of 'Go Lego!'
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Exclamation marks suck. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Uh that reminds me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs [wikipedia.org]
I wonder whether it inspired anyone.
Parent
Re:pictures (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:pictures (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [techdo.com] at the Computer History Museum [computerhistory.org], 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.
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indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been there [flickr.com] once. The tour docent was fairly knowledgeable too.
I just hope they're concentrating on the old stuff more than Web 1.0.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
I mean, c'mon. Do that many of us really live in Mountain View?
Deja News (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Deja News (Score:5, Insightful)
There was no one search engine that I used until somebody at work told me about Google (early 2001). Lycos, Dogpile, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc and so on all come to mind. There was no "loyalty" until Google. Google set the standard. Let's hope it doesn't grow too big for it's breeches.
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Re:Deja News (Score:5, Interesting)
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What a historic year 1998 was.... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about Google, but the world is definitely a better place because of the Dude.
People use Google because... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:People use Google because... (Score:4, Informative)
Google doesn't want you to say Google [cnet.com].
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Google doesn't want you to say Google (Score:5, Informative)
Actually TFA [cnet.com] 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
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Re:Google doesn't want you to say Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for Google (and Adobe, and Xerox) what they want people to do doesn't matter. Fortunately for the Google and Adobe, when people talk about "googling" or "photoshopping" they are still usually using their products. Unlike the large number of people making xeroxes on their Canon copier.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the skate were not Roller Blades I wouldn't use the term "roller blading".
Yes, but it's a good way to stick out like a giant wrinkly penis in social settings to not use the common phrases for things. I call gelatin deserts 'jello', inline skates 'roller blades', and using the search bar in a browser 'googling', if for not other reason than to not have to stop and explain things with more words than needed.
Then again, as a personal entity with no stake in these corporate entities, I could care less about their trademark protections.
Anyway, just about everyone uses Google nowadays,
My wife uses the phrase "Google knows all!" (Score:3, Funny)
And I must admit its caught on...
Re:People use Google because... (Score:5, Funny)
Of all the search engines, Google was the best name to use as a verb.
I disagree. Imagine the conversations if Microsoft's service had caught on:
"Dude, have you seen Japanese tentacle rape?"
"Yeah, I Lived it!"
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Re:People use Google because... (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot is tentacle rape insightful.
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When did I start using google? (Score:5, Funny)
Late 1999. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Late 1999. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd guess I started somewhere in 1999 as well, but possibly 1998 - a guy I'd worked with in college showed it to me and the fact that it had indexed both my college website and my first html, which had somehow gotten nested into a server and never deleted (and was circa 1992 - that is pre-mosaic - I wrote it I believe for WorldWideWeb (it was on NeXT, so logical) and then wrote a different page for another pre-1993 browser (no idea which, but it was text - I don't know if lynx was around yet or not - all I know is my page was all text), but then decided it had no future and Gopher was the future - man, was I ever wrong.
Google's future I could immediately see - easy to remember and a very simple page with fast search and a huge index. Also having come from AltaVista and to a lesser extent, Netscape and Yahoo portals, the lack of massive amounts of advertising was refreshing (and the lack of those newfangled popup ads was cool, too).
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message boards (Score:3, Informative)
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 [google.com] 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 [about.com], specifically searching on topics about photography and archaeology [about.com] or anthropology [about.com]. Google for monte verde [google.com] and Google's first result is T [about.com]
Hell Yes (Score:3, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org].
Creepy Gmail (Score:4, Funny)
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It's easy to forget (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's easy to forget (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, it's easy to remember how bad search was before Google. Someone has set up a very handy page [cuil.com] to remind everyone.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Are you sure? You mean your page wasn't found in the results of:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Anonymous+Coward [cuil.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Altavista was that bad? I mean I grew up with Veronica and WAIS. I do appreciate that Google came out on top, but Altavista rocked for a while :)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I'm TIRED of hearing about Google as some sort of saviour.
Search engines weren't bad before Google. In fact Altavista was great in its day. It didn't survive competition with Google (and probably wouldn't have scaled well).
What has Google brought us? Google news? Nope the bought Deja.
Alta Vista wasn't "great". (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Re:It's easy to forget (Score:5, Funny)
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In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
The Data Center Decade (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Stanford, the venture capital firm (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [stanfordmanage.org] 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!
Re:Stanford, the venture capital firm (Score:4, Interesting)
Congress got irked at all the money just "sitting" there tax free and forced the university's hand by offering reduced, or sometimes even free education to certain lower income families. In this case "lower income" could mean $120,000/yr.
I think the universities could put the money to better use, but singling Stanford out is not telling the whole story. Also, I think VC investing in your students' business ideas is a great use of money and a great way to keep the virtuous cycle going. The key is selling at some point.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/30080 [scrippsnews.com]
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Better? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I really have no idea, but lemme check [google.com]. You expect me to remember things like this?
Wow, seems like a lifetime ago (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Minimal Page Size (Score:4, Informative)
Holy smokes. I feel like a grandparent! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
do you Yahoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Yahoo's big ad campaign to become a verb. No one Yahoos, everyone Googles
It wasn't the results (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
bookmarks (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Binary? (Score:4, Funny)
Is that 10, base 2? Come on, folks. Let your innner geek out. It should read:
Google Turns 0x0A
"Don't be evil" (Score:5, Interesting)
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" [sitetruth.net], where you can't even identify the real business behind the ad.
Then there's Google Checkout. They accept very marginal businesses. [google.com] 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.
Re:Back in school.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [lifehacker.com] methods [nyu.edu] to try to use it without their information getting tracked.
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Re:Back in school.. (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.