Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.
I would argue against this lack of competitors you mentioned. We were using AskJeeves, Webcrawler, yahoo, msn, aol, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot and a myriad of local service providers’ homepages.
Google came much later than all of those, but it was better. How? I don’t know, I was just a kid that got better results from Google than any of those other places.
Just because Google DESTROYED the competition before you got there doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any.
Exactly. I would say more specifically, Google’s PageRank algorithm for prioritizing results was genius because it excluded the vast oceans of word-spam sites that floated to the top of all the other search engines.
Yes! Thanks for reminding me. Some pages would just have a dictionary of popular words in their Metadata so if you were searching for N*Sync (shut up, it was the 90s!) you’d have to scroll through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you found anything related to what you wanted.
One only has to remember all the ‘keywords’ under a youtube video back in the day, it was a nightmare to whittle things down to what you wanted
If we’re talking “back in the day” you had to remember WHICH website you found the video on, because everyone self published, or chose one of hundreds of sites to submit their content to.
You might as well be out of business if you’re result comes up on the second page of Google. :)
Some comedian said that in a comedic way IIRC. It kind of stuck with me and definately holds some truth. No one clicks on the second page unless they are desperate.
At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.
They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren’t playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.
The reason it was better is that the other search engines used the programmer-entered data in a page’s title, meta tags, and headings to categorize the page’s content, whereas google also used the text of links pointing to that page to categorize the page.
Google crowdsourced categorization to content consumers, ie people acting in the same role as searcher.
In a way, it’s an excellent example of the concept of negotiated identity.
Remember when they got rid of Jeeves?
I wonder what’s he’s doing now? I hope Jeeves found a nice Billionaire to work for.
Have you never seen The Remains of the Day?
Fwiw I was aware of a number of those, hence why in the OP I mention: “and few really good competitors.” That wasn’t to suggest there were few total competitors, only that there were few really good competitors, which I think is generally the case any time you have a large number of, well, anything tbh.
May be rather dismissive, but it’s not a new observation by any means.
Guess ya had to be there, then.
I’m guessing your understanding skipped the part about the PageRank system
Yeah it’s a monopoly now, but back then it was a couple of Stanford kids with a good idea on how to make search engines suck less by ranking web pages. And it worked.
But as always, with great power…
As an added bonus: if I recall correctly (which I may not, it was a while ago now), the hilarious thing is that despite its success, the original PageRank system was based on flawed maths :D
Sort of, I don’t know enough (or think I know enough) to speak to the specifics of the PageRank system stuff, which is why I glossed over it. From personal experience with however it works, earlier or now, I’ve not really felt like it suited the way I wanted to search for things, nor allowed for it.
On a really basic level I gather it was (and may still be) related to how often some sites were linked to from other sites, with some extra background weighting this way or that to help surface presumably relevant results. To put it crudely, sort of a popularity contest, give or take the weighting details. That tends to suck though for new or less popular/obscure stuff, the latter of which I tend to prefer (unintentionally, but somewhat intentionally).
You can’t say I don’t know enough and then critique a system.
You absolutely can. I did, and plenty of other people do all the time about a variety of systems, search engines included. That’s not to say they’ll be good critiques, but that’s irrelevant to whether or not they can.
And in that vein, I’m not suggesting mine is a good critique. However it is reflective of my opinions from my experience with their system and my admittedly rough knowledge of it at the time of writing. Instead of adding to dismissive replies, how about we all get together and read the PageRank wikipedia page and learn together.
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
“But this is just, like, my opinion bro”
We’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), maybe learn to read a room?
Edit:
Also, it’s not as if I was speaking authoritatively, I was speaking to my experiences and I was upfront about the limits of my knowledge. Instead of bothering to constructively correct me, you flatly went, “Yeah, no.” and your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason.Instead of bothering to constructively correct me
To quote a certain highly educated someone, we’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), so why would we go into technical details? maybe learn to read a room?
your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason
Except the stated one…
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
People are not gonna bother educating someone who won’t educate themselves, especially when what is said is so completely incorrect they have no idea where to even begin.
Yeah, no.
Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.
Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.
Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.
Yea but it’s not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.
Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn’t matter as much with how the space is now and how Google’s being better in the past wasn’t necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.
Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but “free” markets go brrr.
For me it’s still hit or miss when you’re searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.
Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn’t scan as often and so wouldn’t have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don’t find something on one, I’m pretty surprised how I don’t find it in more or less the same way on the others
“disrupted” 🤢
Annoyingly, Google has gotten so bad over the past year, that I basically give up trying to find a good result half the time. And the other half, I have to spend 10 minutes retrying search terms to find anything that either isn’t an ad, an embedded side-scrolling bullshit thing, and irrelevant websites.
I’ve tried Kagi search a few times this last couple of weeks and was reasonably impressed. If it works out I’d be happy to pay a few pennies for better product recommendations
Microsoft never stopped trying. They made a reasonably good product and even had some monopoly power behind it. But still couldn’t succeed.
To be clear, when referring to a reasonably good product, which iteration of their attempts are you describing?
I was informed about Kagi through one of the posts here and tried it out. It’s quite amazing how much better it is compared to even DDG. I didn’t mind DDG but it felt “old” but Kagi seems to prioritize user experience over everything else. It may not be free, but it’s worth the cost for me.
What’s the cost? What makes it better? Is it like Google used to be?
They have a few plans, but the cheapest is $5/mo. If you go past the allotted searches it’s pay per search after that (at a very tiny cost).
I switched to DDG when Google started adding cards at the bottom of the first page and made search results utterly useless for me. DDG wasn’t bad but it still felt like something was missing or some results were flooded by a specific site. Kagi went the extra step to group results from a site sorta like how Google has.
Ultimately it’s the benefits of old Google but some nice refinements and QoL improvements. Because it’s paid for, they don’t need to sell your data or shove paid for results down your throat.
Thank you!
I’ll tack on to what the other commenter said:
- Cost: I considered myself a heavy searcher (software engineer and gamer) and have been surprised to see I have rarely exceeded even half of my allotted searches ($5/mo, 300 searches). I’m now reprogramming my brain to stop turning to alternatives when something should be easy to find because “I might use up all my queries”.
- Better: apart from all of the cool features, and there are many, there’s also that it just “feels better”. I don’t know how to qualify that despite being a professional in that world. It’s kinda the opposite feeling that I had using Google over the last 5+ years where I wondered if I was getting dumber or if the internet (and Google) was absolutely full of garbage.
It’s on the very short list of subscriptions I pay for right now despite having a very limited budget at the moment.
I think based on your response I’m going to jump in. What other subscriptions you think are worth it?
Not the OP but currently have:
- Kagi - Search…
- Proton - Email, Calendar, VPN, Pass (I just use for aliases). Now that I’ve upped my privacy knowledge I need to reevaluate. I do like their products though from a useability perspective. VPN supporting port forwarding is a bonus.
- Backblaze B2 - off site backups using rclone and Round Sync (android rclone) to sync files
- Mullvad VPN - Just got based on the XMR payment option and RAM only servers. Still deciding where I have a VPN included with Proton. I don’t like putting my eggs all in one basket though as I did with Google so its attractive to keep.
- Bitwarden - Password manager. May switch to self hosted in the future.
- Standard Notes - May switch to self hosted if I don’t lose any features I use.
I used the trial and then just started paying for it. So far, it is much better results, and I like that they do not track you. Also, their small web lens has been fun to play around with.
Another Kagi fan here. I pay $10 a month.
I’m a reasonably heavy search user, but have never hit the quota.
It’s wonderful to have relevant results again.
The one thing it doesn’t work for is shopping. From time to time I use Google. I should probably switch that to Bing, as the lesser of two evils.
I dunno… if someone came around and made a site that works like Google did originally, I think they’d have a shot at taking over. Google has changed so much over the years, it’s barely even recognizable anymore. One of the things that is pretty common with them, too, is taking something a lot of users like as-is, and then completely reworking the UI/UX until nobody wants to use it.
kagi.com - I think they are taking their shot!
I use duckduckgo and no matter what you do it gives localised results. They are getting worse and the only reason to do this is to make more money so I know they are taking data, selling data, or pushing ads or all three.
timing is everything. always has been.
Yes, the other part of the sucking is because of direct Google involvement.
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Brave search has been a good alternatielve so far which does not rely on other search engines to get results.
During the 2000s at least, Google was king and very few people did not see much harm in Google running the search engine market.
