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I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rin

I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rings, not 2021 Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

more_corn 5y ago
I hate google now. Every time I use it by accident I’m reminded how infuriating it is. I know DuckDuckGo is just bing in a Halloween mask, but I’ll gladly use something that’s not awesome as long as it’s also not infuriating. I’d take 2005 google any day.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more. There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard. Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? Google replaced Altavista in my usage, who in turn were usually better than their predecessors.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I used them all and kept using the ones that gave me unique results. Google was hands down better because of pagerank and boosts to dmoz listed sites and because they scanned the whole page ignoring keywords.
pronik 5y ago
I've been using Altavista at that time, every now and then switching to Northern Light. Everything else was abysmal. Google blew them out of the water in terms of speed, quality, simplicity, unclutterdness and everything else. I can't remember ever retraining muscle memory so fast when switching to Google. So, no, Google has been great then and apart from people actively working against the algorithm is still good now, but obviously a completely different beast.
- remus 5y ago
  I think the parent's point was that people say Google 2005 >> Google 2021, but it's pretty hard to make this comparison in an objective way. No doubt Google 2005 was way better than other offerings around at the time.
selcuka 5y ago
Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google, those pages came up on the first page of Altavista. I don't specifically remember 2005, but the quality went down with more modern but still shady SEO practices.
- more_corn 5y ago
  No, quality went down because google shat the bed. All the changes have been deliberate.
eitland 5y ago
> I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade. I know since I bothered to screenshot and blog about it in 2012. I'll admit mistakes happened back then too, but they were more forgivable like keyword stuffing on unrelated pages. Back then Google were on our side and removed those as fast as possible. Today however the problem isn't that someone hss stuffed the keyword into an unrelated page but that Google themselves mix a whole lot of completely irrelevant pages into the results, probably because some metrics go up when they do that. Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting an grand evil master plan here, only that end-to-end metrics will improve as long as there is no realistic competition.
- remus 5y ago
  > Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. This would mean that google were measuring the quality of their search results by the number of ad impressions which seems unlikely to me. Maybe in some big, wooly sense this is sort of true but it seems pretty unlikely that anyone interested in search quality (i.e. the search team at google) is looking at ad impressions.

I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rings, not 2021 Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

more_corn 5y ago

I hate google now. Every time I use it by accident I’m reminded how infuriating it is. I know DuckDuckGo is just bing in a Halloween mask, but I’ll gladly use something that’s not awesome as long as it’s also not infuriating. I’d take 2005 google any day.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more. There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard. Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.

nitrogen 5y ago
I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? Google replaced Altavista in my usage, who in turn were usually better than their predecessors.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I used them all and kept using the ones that gave me unique results. Google was hands down better because of pagerank and boosts to dmoz listed sites and because they scanned the whole page ignoring keywords.

pronik 5y ago

I've been using Altavista at that time, every now and then switching to Northern Light. Everything else was abysmal. Google blew them out of the water in terms of speed, quality, simplicity, unclutterdness and everything else. I can't remember ever retraining muscle memory so fast when switching to Google. So, no, Google has been great then and apart from people actively working against the algorithm is still good now, but obviously a completely different beast.

remus 5y ago
I think the parent's point was that people say Google 2005 >> Google 2021, but it's pretty hard to make this comparison in an objective way. No doubt Google 2005 was way better than other offerings around at the time.

selcuka 5y ago

Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google, those pages came up on the first page of Altavista. I don't specifically remember 2005, but the quality went down with more modern but still shady SEO practices.

more_corn 5y ago
No, quality went down because google shat the bed. All the changes have been deliberate.

eitland 5y ago

> I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade. I know since I bothered to screenshot and blog about it in 2012. I'll admit mistakes happened back then too, but they were more forgivable like keyword stuffing on unrelated pages. Back then Google were on our side and removed those as fast as possible. Today however the problem isn't that someone hss stuffed the keyword into an unrelated page but that Google themselves mix a whole lot of completely irrelevant pages into the results, probably because some metrics go up when they do that. Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting an grand evil master plan here, only that end-to-end metrics will improve as long as there is no realistic competition.

remus 5y ago
> Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. This would mean that google were measuring the quality of their search results by the number of ad impressions which seems unlikely to me. Maybe in some big, wooly sense this is sort of true but it seems pretty unlikely that anyone interested in search quality (i.e. the search team at google) is looking at ad impressions.