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Post by megamixer on Sept 5, 2023 19:31:41 GMT
Caught something on the news yesterday about some sort of Google anniversary and how it has become ingrained into our lives as THE way to search anything.
Made me think about all the OTHER search engines that used to be around and how - in the internet's earlier days - I'd ask the same question in different search engines, looking for different results. There used to be loads, so what ones do you remember using and did you prefer one of them to Google for some reason?
Some old 'uns that I remember using:
- Ask Jeeves
- Lycos
- Search 66 (also had other versions such as Search 33 and Search 99)
- Hotbot
- Yahoo
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Post by elginmcqueen on Sept 5, 2023 20:11:26 GMT
Ask Jeeves had so much hype around it. As if the idea of a search engine at the time was revolutionary.
Google was amazing and still the one I use, but I find more and more I have to use other search engines for a second opinion as Google is too bloated now. Lots of search functions don't even work properly. You can search for a specific person and even if you try to remove certain other names from the search Google will tend to throw them in anyway now.
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Post by thingonaspring on Sept 6, 2023 7:00:25 GMT
Altavista and Webcrawler spring to mind.
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Post by Antiriad2097 on Sept 6, 2023 13:33:35 GMT
Astalavista was an old fave for finding 'things' the mainstream search engines wouldn't show.
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Post by AlexH on Sept 23, 2023 19:23:59 GMT
I wrote a (brief) history of search engines for work a few months ago. Google were the first to use links from other websites as a ranking factor with the concept of PageRank (named after Larry Page). It worked well back then, as friends linked to friends and related websites linked to each other, along with linking to sources - all naturally. But then spammers realised linking could be gamed.
Google came out when I was at uni and I thought it was better than the other search engines around at the time. Yahoo! are planning to go big with search again - it's currently powered by Bing.
I do think Google has got worse and worse in recent years and find myself using Bing more often. I highlighted one issue to John Mueller, a Google employee, and that particular search got better a few months later, so I don't know if I had anything to do with that!
Google has ruined internet content, and it's difficult to find good stuff on some topics (e.g. travel), with people writing to a format with FAQs and trying to get in the likes of the "People Also Ask" snippets. I find it bizarre that e-commerce companies have become some of the biggest publishers in the world.
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Post by thingonaspring on Sept 25, 2023 11:21:19 GMT
I do think Google has got worse and worse in recent years I keep saying this to people, I used to be able to search for something really specific on Google really easily, but now it's just got "dumb" and returns anything even vaguely related to the overall subject. So using this as an example to explain it, not saying this specifically doesn't work any more - but if I was looking for a specific light bulb for a specific model of a car, would get the result instantly before. Now it just throws up anything and everything to do with the manufacturer of the car, instead. Or even just "oh, you searched for 'car'".  |
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Post by AlexH on Sept 29, 2023 20:44:35 GMT
I do think Google has got worse and worse in recent years I keep saying this to people, I used to be able to search for something really specific on Google really easily, but now it's just got "dumb" and returns anything even vaguely related to the overall subject. So using this as an example to explain it, not saying this specifically doesn't work any more - but if I was looking for a specific light bulb for a specific model of a car, would get the result instantly before. Now it just throws up anything and everything to do with the manufacturer of the car, instead. Or even just "oh, you searched for 'car'". YES! They're exactly the kind of issues I've been highlighting. The example I often shared (which has eventually got better) was that when I searched for "Snowdonia," "Snowdon" was considered a synonym, and pretty much every result was only about Snowdon. So it was like Google's algorithms had realised that most people who visit Snowdonia only want to go up Snowdon, which ruins Google for all the searchers who want results about the rest of the national park. One thing I was searching for was [guided winter walks snowdonia], and it seemed "Snowdon" was given a stronger weighting than even the "guided winter walks" part of my query. It's almost like searching for "England" and only getting results for "London." So I think the machine learning goes towards what the masses search for and click, which ruins search results for anyone knowledgeable about a topic or looking for specifics. A slight tangent, but I believe the eventual aim of all these big tech companies is to control our lives (e.g. decide the music we listen to, TV we watch, events we go to, clothes we wear etc), and the same kind of machine learning/AI will lead to homogeneous choices for those who indulge. Ken Liu saw where they're heading with a sci-fi short story he wrote 12 years ago: www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match/ |
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Post by AlexH on Sept 29, 2023 20:54:00 GMT
An even more ridiculous one is "url" being a synonym for "website." I work in the internet industry, and it makes troubleshooting some dev problems via Google virtually impossible. Even excluding webpages containing "url" in the titles didn't help much (-intitle:url).
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Post by oldtimer on Oct 4, 2023 16:14:29 GMT
Alta Vista was my first search engine , unless Geocities was one? cant remember now tbh
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Its just some interesting potential opportunities for AI and automation to help and free humans in the future, rather than enslave us. We need General Zod to implement it.