3 ms·

Not OP, but doesn't availing any particular tiny slice of all knowledge on the web to you within ~1.5 seconds, by inferring your intent incredibly accurately fr

Not OP, but doesn't availing any particular tiny slice of all knowledge on the web to you within ~1.5 seconds, by inferring your intent incredibly accurately from a few words, count as "building robust systems ... that push the envelopes of what humanity is capable of"? Or, how about a video distribution network that serves more than 600,000 hours of video every minute, and manages to do that such that, every time service deteriorates on my 4G connection in a poor country, it's the last website (even considering text only websites) to stop working?

pmoriarty 4y ago
Yeah, I guess before Google you did have to wait 5 whole seconds to get the same information, because of all the ads AltaVista spewed at you along with their search results. Progress. As for YouTube, it was bought, not created by Google, wasn't it?
- davidatbu 4y ago
  As to AltaVista, I'm not old enough to have used it. But my guess is that its accuracy and speed was not higher than that of the best competitors to Google right now. And to me, no competitor comes close in matching Google's combination of accuracy and speed across many categories of search (I've tried bing/you.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo so far). As for youtube, serving video is not the impressive part. It's the scale at which they do it. And my understanding is that the scale has increased exponentially since the 2006 acquisition.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    I'm old enough to remember AltaVista and all of the others. There's a reason I stopped using them almost immediately when I found Google.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      Me too, but it was just a better search engine at the time, which isn't nothing, but not exactly "pushing the envelopes of what humanity is capable of" either.
      - fatnoah 4y ago
        Fair point!
- dekhn 4y ago
  a typical search on altavista in its prime often took 30 seconds. Most of the results would be totally irrelevant.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Yeah, I guess before Google you did have to wait 5 whole seconds to get the same information, because of all the ads AltaVista spewed at you along with their search results. Progress. As for YouTube, it was bought, not created by Google, wasn't it?

davidatbu 4y ago
As to AltaVista, I'm not old enough to have used it. But my guess is that its accuracy and speed was not higher than that of the best competitors to Google right now. And to me, no competitor comes close in matching Google's combination of accuracy and speed across many categories of search (I've tried bing/you.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo so far). As for youtube, serving video is not the impressive part. It's the scale at which they do it. And my understanding is that the scale has increased exponentially since the 2006 acquisition.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  I'm old enough to remember AltaVista and all of the others. There's a reason I stopped using them almost immediately when I found Google.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Me too, but it was just a better search engine at the time, which isn't nothing, but not exactly "pushing the envelopes of what humanity is capable of" either.
    - fatnoah 4y ago
      Fair point!
dekhn 4y ago
a typical search on altavista in its prime often took 30 seconds. Most of the results would be totally irrelevant.