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Google's 20th Birthday
- cosinetau 8y agoHappy 20th, Google! 20 is an interesting time of life for any legal entity. I hope you renew your vision of "don't be evil" for your next 20! With love, me
- fhood 8y agoIt seems just yesterday they were but a wee lad. So adorable and quirky. Now they're all grown up, sniff, how things have changed.
- ergothus 8y agoI've been in this industry for 23 years. A LOT has changed...but I expect I'll be in in for 20-25 more, so I occasionally freak out about how much I know that will be as irrelevant as what I learned in '95 was. (A lot carries over, but...so much doesn't). Back then we had only physical servers (as a practical concern), Linux was considered risky to rely on, there was no social media, and everything on the web was expressed in highway metaphors and spoken of in capital letters ("The World Wide Web"). "Digital" was considered a fancy word, and to the average geek high speed access meant ISDN, while the average person was just starting to be able to imitate a 14400 baud modem connection sound. Wireless wasn't a thing (draft standard I think) and usenet was actually usable.
- eponeponepon 8y agoMan I miss Usenet. Last time I used a news client was 2006, working at a firm that had an internal NNTP server for announcements, general chatter, for sale ads etc. I don't think anyone under 30 would have a clue what to do with newsgroups these days.
- snaky 8y agoreddit.com/r/usenet/ is active. But it's not about text anymore.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoThe Information Superhighway
- cdcfa78156ae5 8y ago> usenet was actually usable When did it stop? comp.lang.* is still pretty active.
- ergothus 8y agosnippets here and there keep trucking, but I think it's fair to say Usenet in it's entirety is not what it used to be.
- snaky 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/9h6cwt/is_usenet_only_for_file_sharing_now_oh_gosh_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/9h6cwt/is_usenet_on...
- tschellenbach 8y agoCongrats Google! You guys have made the world a better place. Search, Adwords, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Navigation, Youtube, Android, Docs, Drive to name a few. Don't forget about that with everything that's going on. Sometimes the internet feels like it's a bit too focused on negative things.
- lisper 8y agoThanks! :-) (I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords. Good to know someone appreciates our work.)
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y agoAll the Googlers whose salaries are paid by the product appreciate it too.
- jacquesm 8y agoI appreciate the technical achievement. But I would have appreciated it even more if it had been a standalone company separated from the rest of Google. The products by themselves are benign, all that power concentrated in the hands of so few is not.
- lisper 8y agoI don’t disagree with you. Unfortunately that part was never up to me.
- mapgrep 8y agoI remember using Google when it was hosted at Stanford.edu, luckily internet archive captures this moment: https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stanford.edu:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta... Notice that the branding is "Google!" with an exclamation point, just like that other Stanford tool for finding stuff online, Yahoo!. The "About Google!" page is pretty interesting, includes links to Sergey and Larry's grad school personal home pages: https://web.archive.org/web/19990204033714/http://google.stanford.edu:80/about.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990204033714/http://google.sta... It also includes, under "credits," this: Research Funding: NSF, NASA, DARPA and Interval Research So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government. (And what is Interval Research, you might ask? Wikipedia says it was a Palo Alto tech incubator co-founded by Paul Allen — previously the co-founder of Microsoft. Lol.)
- justinmk 8y ago> So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government. Oh, right. The thing that sucks trillions of dollars out of the economy and then claims credit for anything it touched.
- solarkraft 8y agoThe thing that ... supported all that innovation and works hard (though it's currently not doing that great) at keeping the economy in check.
- justinmk 8y ago"Supporting innovation" is a low bar. It's easy to do that with lots of money, by allocating a small fraction to investment and wasting the rest. My point is that the cost isn't justified. Your point is "something happened, therefore it's worth the cost".
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- hugg 8y agoWhy doesn't USA have any doodles?
- richardwhiuk 8y agohttps://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2018 https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2018 https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2017 https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2017 through to https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2014 https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2014 https://www.google.com/doodles/4th-of-july https://www.google.com/doodles/4th-of-july https://www.google.com/doodles/mothers-day-2010-usa https://www.google.com/doodles/mothers-day-2010-usa https://www.google.com/doodles/veterans-day-2016 https://www.google.com/doodles/veterans-day-2016 https://www.google.com/doodles/united-states-elections-2016 https://www.google.com/doodles/united-states-elections-2016 https://www.google.com/doodles/united-states-elections-2016-reminder-day-2 https://www.google.com/doodles/united-states-elections-2016-... https://www.google.com/doodles/us-elections-2014 https://www.google.com/doodles/us-elections-2014 https://www.google.com/doodles/2004-us-elections https://www.google.com/doodles/2004-us-elections https://www.google.com/doodles/us-vote-2000 https://www.google.com/doodles/us-vote-2000 https://www.google.com/doodles/labor-day-2016-us https://www.google.com/doodles/labor-day-2016-us https://www.google.com/doodles/dr-martin-luther-king-day-2011 https://www.google.com/doodles/dr-martin-luther-king-day-201... Plenty.
- hugg 8y agoAh ok. It just wasn't showing anything on the map.
- mrtbld 8y agoThe US version is a bit different: https://www.google.com/doodles/googles-20th-birthday-us https://www.google.com/doodles/googles-20th-birthday-us The map on the doodle page is for the presented doodle only.
- kayoone 8y agoi wonder if they took real voice samples from people using voice search for that video or if they have been recorded just for this because the audio quality seems to vary quite a bit.
- snaky 8y ago> Subject: Re: Russian (8-bit) Search ? https://obartunov.livejournal.com/174726.html https://obartunov.livejournal.com/174726.html
- jenscow 8y agoAnyone else noticed the return of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? I wonder if this is related to the anniversary?
- p1mrx 8y agoAre you able to find a date on https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.google.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.google.com/ where the I'm Feeling Lucky button isn't present?
- tyingq 8y agoIt was removed. See https://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-effectively-killed-the-im-feeling-lucky-button-2010-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-effectively-kill... for example. Maybe it's showing it to crawlers/browsers that can't do javascript?
- Invictus0 8y agoIt wasn't removed and is still there. You have to type a query first and Google instant needs to be turned off. It bypasses the results page and selects the first result at the top, like it has always done.
- zabuni 8y agoIf you mouse over it turns into something else. First time I clicked it, I got a built in solitaire game: https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire Second time, it linked me to this: https://onetoday.google.com/ https://onetoday.google.com/ It seems to go to random places around google.
- JTon 8y agoI tried 3 times in short succession and got https://www.google.com/doodles https://www.google.com/doodles every time
- dkrich 8y agoThis is a good time to present a reminder of how clueless most of us are about how the future will look in the present: https://web.archive.org/web/20090324232727/http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2000/nf2000127_947.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20090324232727/http://www.busine...
- bunnycorn 8y agoTBF: the authors concerns were valid, mainly the advertising aspect, which later Google obviously addressed.
- echevil 8y agoIt means I have been using Google for 20 years! It changed lots of aspects of my life. Thank you Google!
- anfilt 8y agoThe google has been as of late though; It makes me wish the company does not have many birthdays. It's kinda sad.
- 43tsdfasdfasdf 8y agoThere are people in college that never knew how much Internet search sucked before Google, or dealt a webmail service with a measly 2MB of storage.
- LeoNatan25 8y agoMay it not reach its 30th.
- exikyut 8y ago10 years is a very short time to erase several exabytes of data, [probably] several hundred million CPUs, and the datacenters that house them.