5 ms·

Google user comment in 2000

41 points by vijaydev 17y ago

tsestrich 17y ago
I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?
- blogimus 17y ago
  You youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert and have to drink water through a capillary tube...
  - jedc 17y ago
    Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly... That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.
  - iamelgringo 17y ago
    Gopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid. When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on. I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks. He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.
  - timcederman 17y ago
    You mean any colour so long as it was the dingy standard grey, right? http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.gif http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.g...
- abalashov 17y ago
  I'm 23, but I still remember fighting with Altavista and Excite to try to get anything even remotely relevant on the web. Google certainly transformed the utility of the web overnight for me.
  - defunkt 17y ago
    Don't forget Metacrawler!
    - antidaily 17y ago
      and HotBot
      - arithmetic 17y ago
        And using Netscape Navigator. Remember that one?
        philwelch 17y ago
        I remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.
    - aarongough 17y ago
      or DogPile!
    - zackattack 17y ago
      Lycos!
    - abalashov 17y ago
      Rest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.
- petercooper 17y ago
  I remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)
  - etherael 17y ago
    It must be some kind of z-modem hackery. (my earliest self explanation for the phenomenon that I too, noticed from a few years messing about on BBS') :)
simplegeek 17y ago
Man, how on earth did you find this comment?
- petercooper 17y ago
  If you go through the USENET archives with Google Groups you can find some incredible stuff. One of my faves is digging up arguments about how much RAM or hard drive space would exist "by the year 2000." Some people back in the 80s and 90s were nuts spouting "scientific" reasons why 512MB of RAM would be a theoretical maximum and similar nonsense.
- vijaydev 17y ago
  I found it from a link in this post - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-homepage.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-h...
philwelch 17y ago
Before Google, I remember guessing relevant-sounding URL's just as often as I remember actually using a search engine. Now if I'm looking for Volkswagen, I don't even try vw.com, volkswagen.com, etc. etc.--I just google "Volkswagen".
- prawn 17y ago
  And you almost have to out of fear of hitting a dodgy site. I don't think it's as much about "before google" and "after google" as it is about how much the landscape has changed in terms of safe browsing. I remember surfing astalavista.box.sk without a care in the world and now I would never risk it (assuming it even still exists).
- timcederman 17y ago
  I watched someone type "youtube" into Google the other day during a company orientation session.
petercooper 17y ago
With most other search engines, you really need to add a "+" in front of every word in order to ensure that it's actually in the result. How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.
- paulbaumgart 17y ago
  Completely agree. I really wish there was a way to turn off the presumptions. Usually when I carefully craft a very specific query, I get back a bunch of generic results unless I put in those pluses. Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly difficult to solve with greasemonkey... Edit: Here's my attempt: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88dfc9627f13aa5191b897f88d0818e0e6f54a8/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88d... Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script. Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might have to be its own extension...
  - paulbaumgart 17y ago
    Sorry, that link should be: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/master/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/mast... Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to all search terms.
- asdlfj2sd33 17y ago
  This seriously happened?! That's messed up and I didn't even notice, except that my searches have not been as easy and crisp, but I've always blamed that on SEO.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Yeah. There are lots of good examples I come across all the time but because I can't remember them, try something silly like "web bosting". You'll notice words like "boosting" and "boating" are in bold in the 23 million results. With "web +bosting" you get just a few thousand results and "bosting" is in all of them. (Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)

41 points by vijaydev 17y ago

I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?

blogimus 17y ago
You youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert and have to drink water through a capillary tube...
- jedc 17y ago
  Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly... That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  Gopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid. When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on. I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks. He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.
- timcederman 17y ago
  You mean any colour so long as it was the dingy standard grey, right? http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.gif http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.g...
abalashov 17y ago
I'm 23, but I still remember fighting with Altavista and Excite to try to get anything even remotely relevant on the web. Google certainly transformed the utility of the web overnight for me.
- defunkt 17y ago
  Don't forget Metacrawler!
  - antidaily 17y ago
    and HotBot
    - arithmetic 17y ago
      And using Netscape Navigator. Remember that one?
      - philwelch 17y ago
        I remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.
  - aarongough 17y ago
    or DogPile!
  - zackattack 17y ago
    Lycos!
  - abalashov 17y ago
    Rest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.
petercooper 17y ago
I remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)
- etherael 17y ago
  It must be some kind of z-modem hackery. (my earliest self explanation for the phenomenon that I too, noticed from a few years messing about on BBS') :)

simplegeek 17y ago

Man, how on earth did you find this comment?

petercooper 17y ago
If you go through the USENET archives with Google Groups you can find some incredible stuff. One of my faves is digging up arguments about how much RAM or hard drive space would exist "by the year 2000." Some people back in the 80s and 90s were nuts spouting "scientific" reasons why 512MB of RAM would be a theoretical maximum and similar nonsense.
vijaydev 17y ago
I found it from a link in this post - http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-homepage.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/patent-for-google-h...

philwelch 17y ago

Before Google, I remember guessing relevant-sounding URL's just as often as I remember actually using a search engine. Now if I'm looking for Volkswagen, I don't even try vw.com, volkswagen.com, etc. etc.--I just google "Volkswagen".

prawn 17y ago
And you almost have to out of fear of hitting a dodgy site. I don't think it's as much about "before google" and "after google" as it is about how much the landscape has changed in terms of safe browsing. I remember surfing astalavista.box.sk without a care in the world and now I would never risk it (assuming it even still exists).
timcederman 17y ago
I watched someone type "youtube" into Google the other day during a company orientation session.

petercooper 17y ago

With most other search engines, you really need to add a "+" in front of every word in order to ensure that it's actually in the result. How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.

paulbaumgart 17y ago
Completely agree. I really wish there was a way to turn off the presumptions. Usually when I carefully craft a very specific query, I get back a bunch of generic results unless I put in those pluses. Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly difficult to solve with greasemonkey... Edit: Here's my attempt: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88dfc9627f13aa5191b897f88d0818e0e6f54a8/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88d... Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script. Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might have to be its own extension...
- paulbaumgart 17y ago
  Sorry, that link should be: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/master/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/mast... Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to all search terms.
asdlfj2sd33 17y ago
This seriously happened?! That's messed up and I didn't even notice, except that my searches have not been as easy and crisp, but I've always blamed that on SEO.
- petercooper 17y ago
  Yeah. There are lots of good examples I come across all the time but because I can't remember them, try something silly like "web bosting". You'll notice words like "boosting" and "boating" are in bold in the 23 million results. With "web +bosting" you get just a few thousand results and "bosting" is in all of them. (Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)