Also you can totally trust them because the corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”
was
They remove the “don’t”
sadly they aren’t quite comically evil yet
We stopped trusting them when the canned that.
In retrospect, it was nice of them to announce the change to everybody.
Fuck, Google has been around for over 25 years.
I was just wondering if this was a picture of a history book.
Yeah, I started using Gmail when it was invite only.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
And Douglas Adams was still alive.
Douglas Adams
Somehow I read this as Scott Adams and was confused for a minute… :-P
I’d be willing to trade Scott for Douglas.
Ikr!? Although how else would we know that bosses are incompetent and meetings suck? (besides experiences lived through daily I suppose:-) 😜
Stuff like this makes me wish technology reached its peak in 2004
It can be confidently argued that the western American empire and it’s related industries (software and the Internet included) peaked in the 90s. We had a bit of hang time at the top and now it’s been free fall since around 2004.
That’s what they said in The Matrix. I guess they called it right.
Honestly it was pretty obvious coming up to y2k that it’d be the last generation of kids that had the same standard of living as their parents…
William Gibson and the entire cyberpunk genre pretty much nailed that stuff from day one. It was supposed to a warning though. Not a playbook.
It did. We’re now on the steady downward slop of enshittification.
Mmmmm… Downward slop.
I know what I said!
Fair but I just mean that Moore’s law should have died and the family Compaq should have been the peak. We wouldn’t have the capacity to run all this big data and spytech shit, at least not to the degree we have now
It’s crazy that the “I’m feeling lucky” button still exists, I probably haven’t clicked it in 20 years (though I’ve been using DDG for like the last five).
What does it do?
Depends on whether he fired six shots or only five. Punk.
Takes you to the first result… it used to be useful.
Wow, I feel fucking old as hell. I remember when this was true and it’s what differentiated Google from the others.
Other search engines it was like page three, but Google had the right link, first choice, a lot of the time. Maybe you’d get down to the fourth or fifth link.
They took over the market, then adopted every bad practice that set them apart (SEO notwithstanding).
The “I’m feeling lucky button” was born from those days. I remember the old times, when it worked.
I also remember when you could tell people “It’s the third link down.” Because everyone would get the same results. Type this phrase into Google, these are the results you get.
Greed is an insidious disease.
frrrrrr
(This was before AdSense)
I remember when search engines just sucked and it was hard to find anything, then I heard about google.standford.edu and the internet was good again.
don’tbe evilThat looks a lot like the textbook I got in University (which I started in '99). I can’t remember if it mentioned Google for sure, though. Yahoo and I think Alta-Vista were in there, along with things like Archie, Gopher, etc.
even at this time there were ads and sponsored links no?
I can remember a time that after a search, you’d just have a list of links. No extra boxes on the side or even an images tab, just the list of links. At the bottom of the page was the word “Google” and there would be more O’s, as they were links to other pages of results.
If there were sponsored links, it didn’t say so and you’d end up with different sites at the top of the list. So I don’t think way back there were.
Google brought AdSense years after that. At the time it wasn’t monetized.
No
It was running on venture capital, betting that giving away search for free would drive Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and all the others out of business, leaving Google free to monopolize and enshittify.
Luckily, it’s illegal to sell products below what they cost in the United States,
so that didn’t happen.Edit: Shit. I keep forgetting when I’m posting in this timeline. We got “Cats” the CGI musical in this one, too, right?! Did we at least get the butthole version here?
No. This is literally 25 years ago before it was monetized.
Google: Why is my SMS messenger sending packets to Google?
I think I remember seeing this back when it came out. What was this printed in?
