5 ms·
Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
by skj 11y ago
Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.
- andybak 11y agoIMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites. Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball. There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.
- astazangasta 11y agoIt is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.
- contingencies 11y agoAgreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.
- oska 11y agoI don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment but Wikipedia was born after Google search appeared.
- frik 11y agoThe original Wiki / WikiWiki / WikiWikiWeb started way before Google, in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb Even Wikipedia used that software in the beginning, as did many other projects. As MediaWiki and Wikipedia got more well known, many sites upgraded their Wiki to MediaWiki.
- nl 11y agoLycos (ha!) and Altavista certainly did NOT do a perfectly fine job. They were more-or-less dreadful if you actually tried to use them to find anything.
- scholia 11y agoActually, AltaVista was a good search engine, if you knew how to use it. What Google did was deskill search, so that you got good (or sometimes better) results from very simple queries, rather than complex search strings.
- nl 11y agoBy the time Google was available Altavista wasn't a good search engine. I was intimately familiar with using it - indeed, I started using it when it was good, as http://www.altavista.digital.com http://www.altavista.digital.com (in those days we had to type both the http:// http:// and the www). The search itself was ok in the sense that it indexed things correctly. However, the ranking was very naively implemented and used basic TF-IDF style ranking of pages that matched the query, with strong bias towards the META tags (remember them?). That meant that meta-tag stuffing was a thing, and very simple keyword stuffed pages ranked very highly.
- scholia 11y agoI was one of the earliest users, and if you could construct good Boolean searches, you could get good results. The thing about Google was that dumb searches worked very well.