Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
I would argue against this lack of competitors you mentioned. We were using AskJeeves, Webcrawler, yahoo, msn, aol, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot and a myriad of local service providers’ homepages.
Google came much later than all of those, but it was better. How? I don’t know, I was just a kid that got better results from Google than any of those other places.
Just because Google DESTROYED the competition before you got there doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any.
Exactly. I would say more specifically, Google’s PageRank algorithm for prioritizing results was genius because it excluded the vast oceans of word-spam sites that floated to the top of all the other search engines.
Yes! Thanks for reminding me. Some pages would just have a dictionary of popular words in their Metadata so if you were searching for N*Sync (shut up, it was the 90s!) you’d have to scroll through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you found anything related to what you wanted.
One only has to remember all the ‘keywords’ under a youtube video back in the day, it was a nightmare to whittle things down to what you wanted
If we’re talking “back in the day” you had to remember WHICH website you found the video on, because everyone self published, or chose one of hundreds of sites to submit their content to.
You might as well be out of business if you’re result comes up on the second page of Google. :)
Some comedian said that in a comedic way IIRC. It kind of stuck with me and definately holds some truth. No one clicks on the second page unless they are desperate.
At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.
They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren’t playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.
The reason it was better is that the other search engines used the programmer-entered data in a page’s title, meta tags, and headings to categorize the page’s content, whereas google also used the text of links pointing to that page to categorize the page.
Google crowdsourced categorization to content consumers, ie people acting in the same role as searcher.
In a way, it’s an excellent example of the concept of negotiated identity.
Fwiw I was aware of a number of those, hence why in the OP I mention: “and few really good competitors.” That wasn’t to suggest there were few total competitors, only that there were few really good competitors, which I think is generally the case any time you have a large number of, well, anything tbh.
May be rather dismissive, but it’s not a new observation by any means.
Guess ya had to be there, then.
I’m guessing your understanding skipped the part about the PageRank system
Yeah it’s a monopoly now, but back then it was a couple of Stanford kids with a good idea on how to make search engines suck less by ranking web pages. And it worked.
But as always, with great power…
As an added bonus: if I recall correctly (which I may not, it was a while ago now), the hilarious thing is that despite its success, the original PageRank system was based on flawed maths :D
Sort of, I don’t know enough (or think I know enough) to speak to the specifics of the PageRank system stuff, which is why I glossed over it. From personal experience with however it works, earlier or now, I’ve not really felt like it suited the way I wanted to search for things, nor allowed for it.
On a really basic level I gather it was (and may still be) related to how often some sites were linked to from other sites, with some extra background weighting this way or that to help surface presumably relevant results. To put it crudely, sort of a popularity contest, give or take the weighting details. That tends to suck though for new or less popular/obscure stuff, the latter of which I tend to prefer (unintentionally, but somewhat intentionally).
You can’t say I don’t know enough and then critique a system.
You absolutely can. I did, and plenty of other people do all the time about a variety of systems, search engines included. That’s not to say they’ll be good critiques, but that’s irrelevant to whether or not they can.
And in that vein, I’m not suggesting mine is a good critique. However it is reflective of my opinions from my experience with their system and my admittedly rough knowledge of it at the time of writing. Instead of adding to dismissive replies, how about we all get together and read the PageRank wikipedia page and learn together.
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
“But this is just, like, my opinion bro”
We’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), maybe learn to read a room?
Edit:
Also, it’s not as if I was speaking authoritatively, I was speaking to my experiences and I was upfront about the limits of my knowledge. Instead of bothering to constructively correct me, you flatly went, “Yeah, no.” and your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason.Instead of bothering to constructively correct me
To quote a certain highly educated someone, we’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), so why would we go into technical details? maybe learn to read a room?
your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason
Except the stated one…
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
People are not gonna bother educating someone who won’t educate themselves, especially when what is said is so completely incorrect they have no idea where to even begin.
Yeah, no.
Annoyingly, Google has gotten so bad over the past year, that I basically give up trying to find a good result half the time. And the other half, I have to spend 10 minutes retrying search terms to find anything that either isn’t an ad, an embedded side-scrolling bullshit thing, and irrelevant websites.
I’ve tried Kagi search a few times this last couple of weeks and was reasonably impressed. If it works out I’d be happy to pay a few pennies for better product recommendations
Microsoft never stopped trying. They made a reasonably good product and even had some monopoly power behind it. But still couldn’t succeed.
To be clear, when referring to a reasonably good product, which iteration of their attempts are you describing?
I use duckduckgo and no matter what you do it gives localised results. They are getting worse and the only reason to do this is to make more money so I know they are taking data, selling data, or pushing ads or all three.
timing is everything. always has been.
Yes, the other part of the sucking is because of direct Google involvement.
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Brave search has been a good alternatielve so far which does not rely on other search engines to get results.
During the 2000s at least, Google was king and very few people did not see much harm in Google running the search engine market.
