Gosh, Google is seven already

[lovingboth]

I remember using it when it was very much in 'beta' (a habit they've kept!) following a recommendation on cix.

At the time Alta Vista - which was then something like www.altavista.digital.com - had been the most useful search engine, but had recently started taking money for good placings. Ooops. Once this was realised, its credibility vanished.

AV's low-crap interface had become a lot more complicated too. Like Yahoo, it wanted to be a Gateway - ker-ching! - not a search engine, because how would you make money from that, apart from accepting bribes for top rankings? Ooops.

So Google came along at exactly the right time. It produced very good results, very quickly, with no fuss.

The things that experienced AV users missed at first - the ability to say 'give me a page with this AND (that OR that)' or '.. starting with this' - turned out not to be a problem because it was so fast you could do two Google searches in the time it took to do one AV search.

And the results were almost always spot on... before people started gaming their algorithms anyway.

I'm not at all surprised 'google' has entered the language as a verb.

Comments

[phantas.livejournal.com]

I remember using something called metacrawler (I think) which would run your query through several search engines at the same time. Very slow but amazing the disparity of results you would get.

Nowadays I sometimes find myself with the attitude "if Google can't find it, it doesn't exist".

Hum.

[uran.livejournal.com]

Ah, altavista! I remember that one! The search engine of choice, directly before google arrived.
And I believe 'google' as an English verb has already entered some dictionaries.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The thing that's bugging me is that I now can't remember what AltaVista replaced at all. I remember it coming along and everyone going "ooh, Alpha processors! Fast" but there was definitely something before it. Was it Yahoo?

[uran.livejournal.com]

I'm not old enough to remember. I was using altavista when I was 11, now I'm two weeks off 22.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

Where Are They Now? Search Engines We've Known & Loved (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175241)

[djm4]

I used both Yahoo and Lycos before AltaVista came along; there were others, as skibbley's link shows.

[phantas.livejournal.com]

I remember using several. Webcrawler and Lycos come to mind. I have a feeling that Metacrawler was named after Webcrawler?
Pre-1994/95 I had a bit of rebellious attitude towards computers...

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I liked hotbot and then dogpile before google. Dogpile can still be nice.