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.
Fuck, Google has been around for over 25 years.
Yeah, I started using Gmail when it was invite only.
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.
Google: Why is my SMS messenger sending packets to Google?
don’tbe evilGreed is an insidious disease.
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.
even at this time there were ads and sponsored links no?
No
No. This is literally 25 years ago before it was monetized.
Google brought AdSense years after that. At the time it wasn’t monetized.
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.
I think I remember seeing this back when it came out. What was this printed in?
