5 ms·

Google Search gave people a super power they never had before. There were lots of search engines before Google. By many metrics they were better than what Goog

Google Search gave people a super power they never had before. There were lots of search engines before Google. By many metrics they were better than what Google is today. They certainly showed fewer ads.

karlshea 4y ago
By what metrics? Just ads? Even with the deterioration of Google Search it’s still WAY better than anything from the AltaVista/Ask Jeeves era.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Is it though? Google has dropped so much from its index these days it is no longer "just put that phrase you wrote ten years ago in quotes and the forum post will come right up". Smaller search engines obviously also suffer from this, but I do believe that peak previous gen are better than this
  - karlshea 4y ago
    I feel like this is some real rose-colored glasses memories, I can’t even begin to agree.
    - sam0x17 4y ago
      My point is more that google of today undeniably has the resources to be that detailed, but they are actively choosing to dumb things down and use AI to figure out what I meant to search instead of just searching for what I tell it to, and they are actively choosing to drop things from the index when they could afford to index literally everything.
      - karlshea 4y ago
        Well I definitely agree about that!
        sam0x17 4y ago
        So I'd rather have something that tries and fails than something that actively shoots itself in the foot
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Google exact phrase matching definitely feels like it has deteriorated.
    - m3rc 4y ago
      I don't know how to estimate nostalgia but I've absolutely noticed google search results getting worse in the past 6 - 18 months. You'll see that the entire page of results is based off one misreading of a phraseology, not what you actually searched for. It feels worse in a "misguided" way, not in a pure deterioration way.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    To be fair, the deterioration of search isn't wholly Google's fault. The web has become less searchable, because people try to game Google's metrics, which leads to Google trying to get clever to provide decent search results, which leads to deterioration of core functionality. I don't really see a good solution short of taking all the "SEO" specialists and their corresponding blogspam and throwing them into a volcano.
- b112 4y ago
  Way better? Dunno. Lots of things I search for, result in a 1/2 page of "helpful google snippets", which quite often have no value, or are even completely wrong. The next half, is then often SEO spam, pages just copying other pages, or mailing lists/forums. This often fills the second page, too, along with the very links google pulled the snippets from. This was sorta how Alta Vista was in the end days, page after page of junk. I think Google is still better, but, it's a joke compared to over 2 years ago, and no, it's not SEO/spam. They're just not putting effort into keeping up, and even benefit by ad placements on those pages.
  - ff317 4y ago
    Yeah... usually when I'm searching, I'm looking for something deep in the weeds, and what I get are really surface-level results. It's like I'm searching for some deep detail about how 3-phase grid voltage levels react to a severely imbalanced load per phase, and instead I get a bunch of junk about how to plug a lamp into a household socket without electrocuting yourself (totally made up illustrative example!). I truly think 1990s AltaVista was better at this kind of stuff than today's Google (but maybe not early Google).
- onion2k 4y ago
  I'm not arguing that the results are worse. Google is obviously more accurate with a larger index etc. But... Ads. Google's SERPs are about 75% ads above the fold on a laptop. They're horrible. Privacy. Everything you do on Google is tracked up the wazoo. It's pretty much impossible to stop too. Share-ability. You can't share a Google search because personalization means everyone gets different results. API access. Yahoo in particular had a really good Search API. You could search via the API and do things with the results. Google only allows you to embed an iframe to their site to display the results their way, with their ads. You can't search programmatically any more unless you pay a lot of money.
sokoloff 4y ago
I remember when Google/pagerank first came out. My experience at the time is that Google was dramatically and undeniably better than the other search engines of the time (ones that many people can't even name now). The catalog/directory style sites were instantly made almost valueless by Google's better mousetrap. Google gave better search results than the previous leader, Altavista (IMO). Whether Google results of 1998 were worse in some measures than Google results of 2023 doesn't say much about whether "giving great search" gave people a super power that they didn't have before. I think it did (though I agree that someone else would have eventually done so, obviously).
- wyclif 4y ago
  For me, it was AltaVista. When Google came out, it was simply mind-blowing how much better it was and I switched immediately.
  - lll-o-lll 4y ago
    What I think people tend to forget in this discussion is the genuine value that google brought when it first came out was not “better search” so much as it was “resilience against gaming”. The pre-www search engines (gopher, Archie, jughead) were pretty sophisticated by allowing you to combine search expressions “and, or, near, phrase”, in essentially a regex style fashion, and they were getting better and better. Early www search engines followed the same approach, operating in the way that some library catalog systems still do. The problem is that they were easily gamed by bad actors. This wasn’t an issue for some time, but the very instant making money become a possibility on the internet, everything changed. People remember google trouncing Altavista, but this was the broken Altavista that couldn’t defend against the scammers. The war had been going on for some time by then, with search engines starting well and failing once their weaknesses were discovered and exploited. That google “topic + reddit” is now a thing says to me that the gamers have again won, and a new search approach is needed.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  While I'm often annoyed if not downright frustrated by Google search results today, it's perfectly clear to me that I wouldn't have the level of career I have if it wasn't for the value Google provided to early internet searches. Compared to the folks who had 10+ years of experience on me in 2000 it certainly felt like a super power.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Previous search engines couldn't really find shit. Google was miles better. That it devolved into ad-rotten mess is different topic.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Clearly you weren't using the right web rings.
- okdood64 4y ago
  > That it devolved into ad-rotten mess is different topic. I'll bite. Can you take take screenshots from some sample searches to prove this point? Because I don't find it an ad-rotten mess. It's still extremely functional, and fairly clean.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    Functional? Do a search for some term that has a few meanings. The first 60% of the page is a summary of wikipedia's article for the wrong meaning, followed by an ad for a competitor of a different meaning of the term followed by a "people also ask" section where the questions are unrelated to what you want. Then scroll down past 2 or 3 actual web links interspersed with adsense links - none of which apply. Then you have the wierd carousel with a bunch of unrelated vidos and a couple links interspersed with ads. During your scroll you'll encounter several links/buttons labeled "more", and it's unclear which of those is actually for "more link results" rather than a switch to video search or whatever. At some point (if you haven't given up in exasperation already) when you decide to refine your search terms, you get the exact same result page, completely ignoring the new terms (although occasionally the ads will change). I guess its functional for extremely basic use cases, but if you ever need to find some deep knowledge, it's literally useless in 2023. In 2008 it was "you'll find it, but it might be on page 10" rather than "good luck not getting mislead on your way to find that page 10 is literally all bot spam".
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    Search for any kind of product review for an appliance. i.e Best microwave, washing machine review, anything like that. Virtually all of the results are astroturfing spam.
icedchai 4y ago
Search before Google was awful. Remember Altavista?
- codebolt 4y ago
  Maybe I was just too young to know better, but I seem to remember AltaVista being pretty decent. My internet was super slow back then anyway, so the search latency probably didn't make a huge difference.
- drewg123 4y ago
  Yes, it was great. I'd love to have it back. 20+ years ago, I could search for exactly what I wanted. Today's search engines often give me a page or so of irrelevant but popular results before I find what I need.
  - m3rc 4y ago
    I think that's a little silly, You can get a google search to look for hyper specific stuff it just requires a little bit of massaging. It was not at all true that there was no massaging required when asking Jeeves for something.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Good luck getting hyper specific stuff now that Google isn't including most of the web in their index anymore. Google quality is the same as AskJeeves was. That's where we ended up with no AltaVista and bing copying results from google.
      - drewg123 4y ago
        I wonder if it is time for somebody to disrupt web search again? Are there any search engines doing full indexing?
- iso1631 4y ago
  Google exposed the wheat from the chaff. But since then google has fallen way down, and search is back to being awful and full of chaff. Whether that's because we have higher expectations, or because the chaff producers have adapted and google has failed to adapt to their adaptation doesn't change the fact that search is back to being a chore like it was in 1998.
jononomo 4y ago
I remember the feeling of magic when Google search first arrived.
- jononomo 4y ago
  I also remember when Google only used to have ads over to the side. I really don't like Google at all now and I'm switching to either DuckDuckGo or Bing.
lowercased 4y ago
Google showed no ads for the first several years of it being around. It was still better than everything else at the time for most common use cases. You trying to say 1997 altavista was better than what google is today? I'm not a fan of google, but that's still a hard strech to make. "by many metrics" = what metrics?

karlshea 4y ago

By what metrics? Just ads? Even with the deterioration of Google Search it’s still WAY better than anything from the AltaVista/Ask Jeeves era.

sam0x17 4y ago
Is it though? Google has dropped so much from its index these days it is no longer "just put that phrase you wrote ten years ago in quotes and the forum post will come right up". Smaller search engines obviously also suffer from this, but I do believe that peak previous gen are better than this
- karlshea 4y ago
  I feel like this is some real rose-colored glasses memories, I can’t even begin to agree.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    My point is more that google of today undeniably has the resources to be that detailed, but they are actively choosing to dumb things down and use AI to figure out what I meant to search instead of just searching for what I tell it to, and they are actively choosing to drop things from the index when they could afford to index literally everything.
    - karlshea 4y ago
      Well I definitely agree about that!
      - sam0x17 4y ago
        So I'd rather have something that tries and fails than something that actively shoots itself in the foot
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Google exact phrase matching definitely feels like it has deteriorated.
  - m3rc 4y ago
    I don't know how to estimate nostalgia but I've absolutely noticed google search results getting worse in the past 6 - 18 months. You'll see that the entire page of results is based off one misreading of a phraseology, not what you actually searched for. It feels worse in a "misguided" way, not in a pure deterioration way.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  To be fair, the deterioration of search isn't wholly Google's fault. The web has become less searchable, because people try to game Google's metrics, which leads to Google trying to get clever to provide decent search results, which leads to deterioration of core functionality. I don't really see a good solution short of taking all the "SEO" specialists and their corresponding blogspam and throwing them into a volcano.
b112 4y ago
Way better? Dunno. Lots of things I search for, result in a 1/2 page of "helpful google snippets", which quite often have no value, or are even completely wrong. The next half, is then often SEO spam, pages just copying other pages, or mailing lists/forums. This often fills the second page, too, along with the very links google pulled the snippets from. This was sorta how Alta Vista was in the end days, page after page of junk. I think Google is still better, but, it's a joke compared to over 2 years ago, and no, it's not SEO/spam. They're just not putting effort into keeping up, and even benefit by ad placements on those pages.
- ff317 4y ago
  Yeah... usually when I'm searching, I'm looking for something deep in the weeds, and what I get are really surface-level results. It's like I'm searching for some deep detail about how 3-phase grid voltage levels react to a severely imbalanced load per phase, and instead I get a bunch of junk about how to plug a lamp into a household socket without electrocuting yourself (totally made up illustrative example!). I truly think 1990s AltaVista was better at this kind of stuff than today's Google (but maybe not early Google).
onion2k 4y ago
I'm not arguing that the results are worse. Google is obviously more accurate with a larger index etc. But... Ads. Google's SERPs are about 75% ads above the fold on a laptop. They're horrible. Privacy. Everything you do on Google is tracked up the wazoo. It's pretty much impossible to stop too. Share-ability. You can't share a Google search because personalization means everyone gets different results. API access. Yahoo in particular had a really good Search API. You could search via the API and do things with the results. Google only allows you to embed an iframe to their site to display the results their way, with their ads. You can't search programmatically any more unless you pay a lot of money.

sokoloff 4y ago

I remember when Google/pagerank first came out. My experience at the time is that Google was dramatically and undeniably better than the other search engines of the time (ones that many people can't even name now). The catalog/directory style sites were instantly made almost valueless by Google's better mousetrap. Google gave better search results than the previous leader, Altavista (IMO). Whether Google results of 1998 were worse in some measures than Google results of 2023 doesn't say much about whether "giving great search" gave people a super power that they didn't have before. I think it did (though I agree that someone else would have eventually done so, obviously).

wyclif 4y ago
For me, it was AltaVista. When Google came out, it was simply mind-blowing how much better it was and I switched immediately.
- lll-o-lll 4y ago
  What I think people tend to forget in this discussion is the genuine value that google brought when it first came out was not “better search” so much as it was “resilience against gaming”. The pre-www search engines (gopher, Archie, jughead) were pretty sophisticated by allowing you to combine search expressions “and, or, near, phrase”, in essentially a regex style fashion, and they were getting better and better. Early www search engines followed the same approach, operating in the way that some library catalog systems still do. The problem is that they were easily gamed by bad actors. This wasn’t an issue for some time, but the very instant making money become a possibility on the internet, everything changed. People remember google trouncing Altavista, but this was the broken Altavista that couldn’t defend against the scammers. The war had been going on for some time by then, with search engines starting well and failing once their weaknesses were discovered and exploited. That google “topic + reddit” is now a thing says to me that the gamers have again won, and a new search approach is needed.
tstrimple 4y ago
While I'm often annoyed if not downright frustrated by Google search results today, it's perfectly clear to me that I wouldn't have the level of career I have if it wasn't for the value Google provided to early internet searches. Compared to the folks who had 10+ years of experience on me in 2000 it certainly felt like a super power.

KptMarchewa 4y ago

Previous search engines couldn't really find shit. Google was miles better. That it devolved into ad-rotten mess is different topic.

jcadam 4y ago
Clearly you weren't using the right web rings.
okdood64 4y ago
> That it devolved into ad-rotten mess is different topic. I'll bite. Can you take take screenshots from some sample searches to prove this point? Because I don't find it an ad-rotten mess. It's still extremely functional, and fairly clean.
- sophacles 4y ago
  Functional? Do a search for some term that has a few meanings. The first 60% of the page is a summary of wikipedia's article for the wrong meaning, followed by an ad for a competitor of a different meaning of the term followed by a "people also ask" section where the questions are unrelated to what you want. Then scroll down past 2 or 3 actual web links interspersed with adsense links - none of which apply. Then you have the wierd carousel with a bunch of unrelated vidos and a couple links interspersed with ads. During your scroll you'll encounter several links/buttons labeled "more", and it's unclear which of those is actually for "more link results" rather than a switch to video search or whatever. At some point (if you haven't given up in exasperation already) when you decide to refine your search terms, you get the exact same result page, completely ignoring the new terms (although occasionally the ads will change). I guess its functional for extremely basic use cases, but if you ever need to find some deep knowledge, it's literally useless in 2023. In 2008 it was "you'll find it, but it might be on page 10" rather than "good luck not getting mislead on your way to find that page 10 is literally all bot spam".
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  Search for any kind of product review for an appliance. i.e Best microwave, washing machine review, anything like that. Virtually all of the results are astroturfing spam.

icedchai 4y ago

Search before Google was awful. Remember Altavista?

codebolt 4y ago
Maybe I was just too young to know better, but I seem to remember AltaVista being pretty decent. My internet was super slow back then anyway, so the search latency probably didn't make a huge difference.
drewg123 4y ago
Yes, it was great. I'd love to have it back. 20+ years ago, I could search for exactly what I wanted. Today's search engines often give me a page or so of irrelevant but popular results before I find what I need.
- m3rc 4y ago
  I think that's a little silly, You can get a google search to look for hyper specific stuff it just requires a little bit of massaging. It was not at all true that there was no massaging required when asking Jeeves for something.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Good luck getting hyper specific stuff now that Google isn't including most of the web in their index anymore. Google quality is the same as AskJeeves was. That's where we ended up with no AltaVista and bing copying results from google.
    - drewg123 4y ago
      I wonder if it is time for somebody to disrupt web search again? Are there any search engines doing full indexing?
iso1631 4y ago
Google exposed the wheat from the chaff. But since then google has fallen way down, and search is back to being awful and full of chaff. Whether that's because we have higher expectations, or because the chaff producers have adapted and google has failed to adapt to their adaptation doesn't change the fact that search is back to being a chore like it was in 1998.

jononomo 4y ago

I remember the feeling of magic when Google search first arrived.

jononomo 4y ago
I also remember when Google only used to have ads over to the side. I really don't like Google at all now and I'm switching to either DuckDuckGo or Bing.

lowercased 4y ago

Google showed no ads for the first several years of it being around. It was still better than everything else at the time for most common use cases. You trying to say 1997 altavista was better than what google is today? I'm not a fan of google, but that's still a hard strech to make. "by many metrics" = what metrics?