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.
Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.
Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.
Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Carighan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
knotthatone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.
evdo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Remember when they got rid of Jeeves?
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wonder what’s he’s doing now? I hope Jeeves found a nice Billionaire to work for.
ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Maybe rather dismissive, but it’s not a new observation by any means.
whynotzoidberg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Guess ya had to be there, then.