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Seth's Blog: Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock
- michael_dorfman 18y agoA question: back when we were all using AltaVista, did we know we needed Google? Or, put another way, was Catherine Deneuve the next Bridget Bardot?
- pchristensen 18y agoBecause AltaVista was the least awful of the search engines. If you ever found a good site, you had to bookmark it because you knew you'd never find it again with a search engine. I don't have a good actress comparison, but let's use online maps. I knew that Mapquest was slow and ugly when I was using it, so I jumped ship (fast) to MSN Maps, which was slightly faster and much prettier (still the best looking maps, I'd argue). I didn't have any complaints about it - it was like Google (the search engine) is now. When Google Maps came out, it didn't do everything MSN Maps did but it was so much easier to use for 95% of the time that I quickly jumped ship, again. If something is going to beat Google, it has to change the game completely, like the the accelerometer did for games (iPhone/Wii) or like Google Maps did for mapping (fast live draggable views). What would that be for search? That's the $100,000,000,000 question.
- pchristensen 18y agoFunny, Cringely just wrote about the same idea: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080728_005308.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080728_0053...
- michael_dorfman 18y agoYes, and Cringely (oddly enough) makes the same point that I was getting at-- when we were using AltaVista, we didn't know we needed something better; it sure seemed good enough at the time.
- pchristensen 18y agoWeird. I remember thinking of a AltaVista like a cell phone company - necessary evil but not particularly satisfying. I remember routinely looking through 40-50 results before I found what I was looking for and wondering why it couldn't find what I wanted.