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Google in 1998

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Re: Google in 1998

#53

Post by bsullivan01 »

josteink wrote: post #29

Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today. It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much…

distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more.

Depends on the goal. Right now Google wants users to click on ads so if they make everything confusing, ads seems refreshingly simple. Also a link to a non-Google site means less chances on clicking on Google ads so they stuff search with Youtube crap, Local, Images...and they stretch the ads vertically to take virtually all the screen on top resolutions etc. A lot of times Google results for expensive keywords are totally out of whack, but ads are perfect.

Google is ripe for disruption and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks. If they lose the Mozilla and iOS traffic it's a nice start. If we had a government, they wouldn't allow Google with all that market share to buy more.

Re: Google in 1998

#54

Post by wjk »

josteink wrote: post #29

Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today. It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much…

You cant be serious. I mean, it's nice that duckduckgo tries, but compared to google their "innovation" is basically non-existent. The amount of special cases and functionality google has added to their search engine the past couple years is massive[1]. They have become just fantastic at giving the user what they were searching for right away without even having to click on a link [2]. The use of space by google is so far ahead of DDG it's not even fair.

That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too, not to mention all the search related settings you can configure if you have a google account, which also are quite massive.

Competition is good, but at this point there is no competition yet.

[1] - http://www.google.com/help/features.html [2] - http://i.imgur.com/rN0Vge0.png

Re: Google in 1998

#55

Post by andrewaylett »

dm8 wrote: post #13

They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page

It's a bit of a shame that the link to AltaVista doesn't point to the search engine site. I think they did eventually get altavista.com (it redirects to Yahoo now) but the IA link given pre-dates that.

Re: Google in 1998

#56

Post by stevetursi »

Raphael wrote: post #8

Try your query on: AltaVista Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Deja Yahoo! Amazon Open Directory eGroups

Trying each of those today (the links on the site go to waybackmachine) -

Altavista.com: Redirects to yahoo.

Excite: still up

HotBot (boy there's one I haven't heard of in years): still up

InfoSeek: redirects to go.com, which appears to now host the site of Disney's holding company.

Deja.com (which I think I remember): redirects to google groups

Yahoo: still up

Amazon: still up

dmoz.org: still up

egroups: redirects to yahoo groups

Re: Google in 1998

#57

Post by tokenadult »

mortenlarsen wrote: post #40
tokenadult wrote: post #16

For me, following the link here comes up as my default set-up for iGoogle, the home page skin that Google will deprecate in another month or so. I have used Google since the beginning. I was amused, when I updated my personal website at the beginning of this year, to discover that most of the pages on my site still had a paragraph specifically recommending Google, as if most people had never heard of it. That's how e…

Try: https://www.google.com/ncr#q=google+in+1998&safe=off The ncr part is "no client redirect", this should keep you on google.com instead of redirecting you to a localized version.

Thanks for that tip. Alas, I still see iGoogle that way. I can try on another browser. Yep, it works in IE on my desktop machine--Chrome must have deep settings that force the customization to iGoogle.

Re: Google in 1998

#58

Post by josteink »

wjk wrote: post #54
josteink wrote: post #29

Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today. It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much…

You cant be serious. I mean, it's nice that duckduckgo tries, but compared to google their "innovation" is basically non-existent. The amount of special cases and functionality google has added to their search engine the past couple years is massive[1]. They have become just fantastic at giving the user what they were searching for right away without even having to click on a link [2]. The use of space by google is s…

You cant be serious.

Oh but I am. It's nice that you are attempting back your point with concrete examples, but none of those examples impress me. Those features are implemented in a way which I dislike.

And that's the thing here: Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned. Yes, that is subjective, but so are most of your points as well.

Personally I much prefer DDG's response[1] to your one search query. I think the focus-nessed of that response is much more impressive and innovative than Google's attempt.

Does Google even have a "Official site" feature yet? That's one of the few things which I use every day with DDG. It's one thing less I have to worry about when looking for things which are new to me.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/khbMz7p.png

Re: Google in 1998

#59

Post by aestra »

josteink wrote: post #29

Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today. It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more. Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much…

Ajax search was the most disruptive part of the UI for me. I still don't understand the point of it. Well, I understand the auto-suggest, but why send me right away to the results page, and auto populate the results before I've asked you to? I'm not done typing yet. It's completely unintuitive behavior. It is jarring.
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