• umbraroze@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    6 months ago

    A lot of e-companies, particularly the search engines, around the turn of the millennium, went completely crazy over the “portal” business. Everyone wanted you to make them your home page. News feeds, generous 15 megabytes of email space, web search index last updated 1.5 geological megacycles ago - “well, you see, the web sure is growing rapidly, dunno if anyone can do anything about that in the future, we sure can’t”. Oh and ads. Lots of ads.

    So in that light, Google kind of stood out. Actually updated search index, relevant results, no-nonsense user interface.

    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      6 months ago

      Google was both the best tool to use the Internet and the killer app that anyone could use for the new market. It’s instant gigantic growth was because it was good at what it did. Then it forgot what it did and started doing everything another big tech company did, like phones or social media or streaming services. Now it does everything and none of it particularly well. Shame.

      • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
        10·
        6 months ago

        They placed quarterly profits over true innovation, then began the slide into irrelevancy

    • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, this is the context here. The trend was to have these super dense home pages with all sorts of overwhelming noise, like the Yahoo home page:

      Google was remarkable for bucking that trend, and basically still does have that ultra focused home page. It’s not that now Google shows you ads and a weather widget in the search results-- it’s that it’s got the good sense to at least wait until you search for something.

      Not to detract from the enshittification-themed comments or anything. Please do carry on, fellows.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    6 months ago

    People have latched onto “enshittification” to mean “things got worse,” but this is exactly the phase 1 example of the was Doctorow defined it. Google started out being something optimized for the benefit of the user.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Meanwhile I open Edge at work and there’s highly sexual advertising on the screen with the default home page settings.

    Well it’s Edge I guess that’s true.

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
    9·
    6 months ago

    They are talking about Yahoo, which was awesome in the mid 90’s, until they decided to try to do everything, shittily. But nobody at Google remembers their roots. They reinvented Yahoo. And now, we’re primed for the next Google.

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    6 months ago

    You could’ve shown us the logo. This was the year when it got rid of the exclamation point and got rewritten in a different font. I’m not sure which logo I prefer.

    But yeah, Google in 1999 was pretty damn cool. I wish it still was because my God they stooped way too low lately.

    • Ech@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      Does firefox do this automatically? Because I’ve never seen this junk everyone is talking about, and was wondering why. This might explain it.

      • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.orgEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        I haven’t seen any of this AI stuff yet on my end. I’m wondering if it’s not fully rolled out yet?

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          Thank you. I can’t believe I never thought of this.

          For those reading along:

          On Firefox for Android, go to Settings > Search > Default Search Engine > Add Search Engine

          For name, I use “Google Decrapified” For URL, I use “https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s”

          I am told the “udm=14” part disables the AI bullshit.

        • Ech@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          I get that. But I’ve never done that on my own, yet I still get similar results in my searches. Hence my question about firefox doing it automatically.

          *Just tried identical G searches on Firefox and Edge, and there’s definitely something going on filtering out all the garbage. The Edge search is downright unusable. Wow.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    I don’t know what they mean by ‘portal litter’, but lol. They do every other thing they listed now.

    • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      6 months ago

      Back then the internet wasn’t so persistently and automatically indexed, so most people used a portal that indexed as it went at semi-regular intervals. But the whole “google spiders crawling for pages” thing didn’t really exist and a lot of them did it entirely manually.

      Basically take a website homepage concept and apply it to your browser internet navigation. The portal would be how you search/navigate initially.

        • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          6 months ago

          Think of it like a car dashboard with tons of information but 90% of is irrelevant. There’s a search (each one had very different results), there’s a weather widget, maybe some news headlines, maybe some suggested web pages or new ones. Stock market ticker, comic of the day, just throwing stuff at the wall because more features = better. Very cluttered and busy. Like early MySpace.

          So google comes in and does three important things: comprehensive and consistent indexing coupled with an excellent search ranking system that was a decade ahead of everyone, and killed the clutter.

          Ask Jeeves, Alta vista, etc. kind of cracked indexing as well but they just could not crack giving relevant results at such a consistent rate as Google. Until a couple of years ago almost no one ever looked at page 2 of search results on google, no matter how obscure the search. Your first 1-10 hits usually did it even in the early 2000’s. It was truly a marvel.