Google Search gave people a super power they never had before.
There were lots of search engines before Google. By many metrics they were better than what Google is today. They certainly showed fewer ads.
There were lots of search engines before Google. By many metrics they were better than what Google is today. They certainly showed fewer ads.
The catalog/directory style sites were instantly made almost valueless by Google's better mousetrap. Google gave better search results than the previous leader, Altavista (IMO).
Whether Google results of 1998 were worse in some measures than Google results of 2023 doesn't say much about whether "giving great search" gave people a super power that they didn't have before. I think it did (though I agree that someone else would have eventually done so, obviously).
The pre-www search engines (gopher, Archie, jughead) were pretty sophisticated by allowing you to combine search expressions “and, or, near, phrase”, in essentially a regex style fashion, and they were getting better and better. Early www search engines followed the same approach, operating in the way that some library catalog systems still do. The problem is that they were easily gamed by bad actors.
This wasn’t an issue for some time, but the very instant making money become a possibility on the internet, everything changed. People remember google trouncing Altavista, but this was the broken Altavista that couldn’t defend against the scammers. The war had been going on for some time by then, with search engines starting well and failing once their weaknesses were discovered and exploited.
That google “topic + reddit” is now a thing says to me that the gamers have again won, and a new search approach is needed.
There's absolutely nothing available for my day job online, so you could say I've been living without Google for a decade. It's not as tough as you'd think. You just have to remember some basic syntax in your head or write it down in your notes, and look up APIs when you use them.
It doesn't honestly take much longer to do something sans-Google at work than it does to cobble web stuff together with Google and StackOverflow's help. It's OK
Certainly not everything is on the web with or without paywalls. And, as when I was doing software development at night pre-web, I could just have a library of books. But for a lot of things, you made do with taking longer, being more shallow, and making more mistakes.
I'll bite. Can you take take screenshots from some sample searches to prove this point? Because I don't find it an ad-rotten mess. It's still extremely functional, and fairly clean.
Then scroll down past 2 or 3 actual web links interspersed with adsense links - none of which apply. Then you have the wierd carousel with a bunch of unrelated vidos and a couple links interspersed with ads.
During your scroll you'll encounter several links/buttons labeled "more", and it's unclear which of those is actually for "more link results" rather than a switch to video search or whatever.
At some point (if you haven't given up in exasperation already) when you decide to refine your search terms, you get the exact same result page, completely ignoring the new terms (although occasionally the ads will change).
I guess its functional for extremely basic use cases, but if you ever need to find some deep knowledge, it's literally useless in 2023. In 2008 it was "you'll find it, but it might be on page 10" rather than "good luck not getting mislead on your way to find that page 10 is literally all bot spam".
Lots of things I search for, result in a 1/2 page of "helpful google snippets", which quite often have no value, or are even completely wrong.
The next half, is then often SEO spam, pages just copying other pages, or mailing lists/forums.
This often fills the second page, too, along with the very links google pulled the snippets from.
This was sorta how Alta Vista was in the end days, page after page of junk.
I think Google is still better, but, it's a joke compared to over 2 years ago, and no, it's not SEO/spam.
They're just not putting effort into keeping up, and even benefit by ad placements on those pages.
Ads. Google's SERPs are about 75% ads above the fold on a laptop. They're horrible.
Privacy. Everything you do on Google is tracked up the wazoo. It's pretty much impossible to stop too.
Share-ability. You can't share a Google search because personalization means everyone gets different results.
API access. Yahoo in particular had a really good Search API. You could search via the API and do things with the results. Google only allows you to embed an iframe to their site to display the results their way, with their ads. You can't search programmatically any more unless you pay a lot of money.
20+ years ago, I could search for exactly what I wanted. Today's search engines often give me a page or so of irrelevant but popular results before I find what I need.
But since then google has fallen way down, and search is back to being awful and full of chaff. Whether that's because we have higher expectations, or because the chaff producers have adapted and google has failed to adapt to their adaptation doesn't change the fact that search is back to being a chore like it was in 1998.
You trying to say 1997 altavista was better than what google is today? I'm not a fan of google, but that's still a hard strech to make. "by many metrics" = what metrics?