BlueSky Post.
Transcript.
If you tell someone to “Google it” at this point you’re telling them to look up five ads and some AI-generated bs instead of the actual thing they want to know.
old guy takes long hit on the bong
“Back in my day, search engines used to find things besides the wreckage of late-stage capitalism.”
Google was a "disrupter"
Which means they burnt investor money for years to deliver a great product while not making any profit.
Once they gain market share and are the default, enshitification begins and people eventually wonder why they're still using it.
Haven’t used Google in months and haven’t felt any loss in my quality of life. Protonmail and DuckDuckGo, easy peasy
The one Google product that I still use is Google maps. Openstreetmaps just isn't as good in my area and only Google maps, Waze, and Apple maps have accurate traffic data here.
Also for the uninformed Google owns Waze.
I can't stop using that and Google photos. Instant backup of all photos, and more importantly, great search. It even recognizes my two dogs.
I'm working on improving Open Street Maps wherever I can, but I'm only one person. Every few weeks or so I'll login and add or fix something. Slowly but surely!
While live traffic might be a hurdle (even though Magic Earth, despite not being FOSS, has good enough data, at least for me), why not contribute to OSM yourself?
I do have street complete and contribute for my neighborhood, but there just aren't enough other ppl nearby contributing to be useable. There are a lot of missing roads in my town.
The search engine wasn't disruptive in the sense that it was subsidized, it was disruptive in the sense that it didn't try to be the portal to everything in the internet (as opposed to, say, Yahoo) but offered a clean page.
PageRank was a huge deal, and drastically increased the quality of the results over previous approaches. They absolutely disrupted search.
Google was founded in 1998. AdWords came out in 2000 and the company had its first profitable quarter in 2001. Three years isn't bad to build a tech company that can turn a profit.
They are an ad company first and foremost. Search, Android, Chromebooks, browsers and Cloud hosting all just feed their machine.
More that SEO won.
My favorite is googling something, the first result is a reddit post asking the exact question I need answered. There is only one reply telling the OP that they could easily Google it instead of asking on Reddit.
I used to necro those old posts by replying "this is what your fucking bullshit response gets us. I googled it and ended up here reading your arrogant response instead of finding an answer."
Thank you for your service.
"if you can believe it, at one point there were no search engines, and if you wanted to know what was out there you had to get a big book that listed all the websites."
*gasp!
Proud owner of "The Internet Yellow Pages" here. I wonder if I still have my copy in storage.
There is a blast from the past. I forgot about that, thanks for the reminder.
Some images: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=internet+yellow+pages&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd0mojqvbku741.jpg
Back in my day if you Googled failure the Whitehouse.gov webpage about George W. Bush would appear.
I remember when whitehouse.com was a porn site
If you're not using adblock, you're doing it wrong anyway.
That doesn't really help much with all the ass tier search results that are just the same terribly written/uninformative article being regurgitated :(
They're going to use the year chatGPT came out as an equivalent to how 1945 is used to calibrate radiometric tests. These days I don't trust any search result published 2022, as 95% of those first page results are ai generated garbage.
Back in my day, we had to hit Borders, Barnes & Noble, or Books-A-Million to find tech books to help us figure out what to do. Dot-com cubicle shelves always had a mini library.
O'Reilly made so much money.
I learned C++ from a book I borrowed from the library.
I Bing stuff and like to Edge so hard at work, that I dont even miss Google.
That’s crazy, I love Kevin Hearne I didn’t know he was on bluesky. The Iron Druid books are great
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
