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Google Turns 10
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Friday September 05, @04:53PM
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)
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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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Re:pictures (Score:5, Informative)
Uh that reminds me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs [wikipedia.org]
I wonder whether it inspired anyone.
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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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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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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When did I start using google? (Score:5, Funny)
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Late 1999. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's easy to forget (Score:5, Interesting)
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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:It's easy to forget (Score:5, Funny)
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In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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!
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do you Yahoo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Yahoo's big ad campaign to become a verb. No one Yahoos, everyone Googles
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"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.
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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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