this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
116 points (90.8% liked)

Showerthoughts

29633 readers
983 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.

all 38 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I would argue against this lack of competitors you mentioned. We were using AskJeeves, Webcrawler, yahoo, msn, aol, Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot and a myriad of local service providers' homepages.

Google came much later than all of those, but it was better. How? I don't know, I was just a kid that got better results from Google than any of those other places.

Just because Google DESTROYED the competition before you got there doesn't mean that there wasn't any.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. I would say more specifically, Google's PageRank algorithm for prioritizing results was genius because it excluded the vast oceans of word-spam sites that floated to the top of all the other search engines.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes! Thanks for reminding me. Some pages would just have a dictionary of popular words in their Metadata so if you were searching for N*Sync (shut up, it was the 90s!) you'd have to scroll through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you found anything related to what you wanted.

[–] med@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

One only has to remember all the ‘keywords’ under a youtube video back in the day, it was a nightmare to whittle things down to what you wanted

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If we're talking "back in the day" you had to remember WHICH website you found the video on, because everyone self published, or chose one of hundreds of sites to submit their content to.

[–] Zippy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

You might as well be out of business if you're result comes up on the second page of Google. :)

Some comedian said that in a comedic way IIRC. It kind of stuck with me and definately holds some truth. No one clicks on the second page unless they are desperate.

[–] knotthatone@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.

They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren't playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

The reason it was better is that the other search engines used the programmer-entered data in a page’s title, meta tags, and headings to categorize the page’s content, whereas google also used the text of links pointing to that page to categorize the page.

Google crowdsourced categorization to content consumers, ie people acting in the same role as searcher.

In a way, it’s an excellent example of the concept of negotiated identity.

[–] evdo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Remember when they got rid of Jeeves?

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder what's he's doing now? I hope Jeeves found a nice Billionaire to work for.

[–] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

Have you never seen The Remains of the Day?

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fwiw I was aware of a number of those, hence why in the OP I mention: "and few really good competitors." That wasn't to suggest there were few total competitors, only that there were few really good competitors, which I think is generally the case any time you have a large number of, well, anything tbh.

May be rather dismissive, but it's not a new observation by any means.

[–] whynotzoidberg@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Guess ya had to be there, then.

[–] Arrakis@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm guessing your understanding skipped the part about the PageRank system

Yeah it's a monopoly now, but back then it was a couple of Stanford kids with a good idea on how to make search engines suck less by ranking web pages. And it worked.

But as always, with great power...

As an added bonus: if I recall correctly (which I may not, it was a while ago now), the hilarious thing is that despite its success, the original PageRank system was based on flawed maths :D

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sort of, I don't know enough (or think I know enough) to speak to the specifics of the PageRank system stuff, which is why I glossed over it. From personal experience with however it works, earlier or now, I've not really felt like it suited the way I wanted to search for things, nor allowed for it.

On a really basic level I gather it was (and may still be) related to how often some sites were linked to from other sites, with some extra background weighting this way or that to help surface presumably relevant results. To put it crudely, sort of a popularity contest, give or take the weighting details. That tends to suck though for new or less popular/obscure stuff, the latter of which I tend to prefer (unintentionally, but somewhat intentionally).

[–] Fumbles@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can't say I don't know enough and then critique a system.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You absolutely can. I did, and plenty of other people do all the time about a variety of systems, search engines included. That's not to say they'll be good critiques, but that's irrelevant to whether or not they can.

And in that vein, I'm not suggesting mine is a good critique. However it is reflective of my opinions from my experience with their system and my admittedly rough knowledge of it at the time of writing. Instead of adding to dismissive replies, how about we all get together and read the PageRank wikipedia page and learn together.

[–] Arrakis@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.

"But this is just, like, my opinion bro"

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We're not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it's a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), maybe learn to read a room?

Edit:
Also, it's not as if I was speaking authoritatively, I was speaking to my experiences and I was upfront about the limits of my knowledge. Instead of bothering to constructively correct me, you flatly went, "Yeah, no." and your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason.

[–] Arrakis@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Instead of bothering to constructively correct me

To quote a certain highly educated someone, we’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), so why would we go into technical details? maybe learn to read a room?

your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason

Except the stated one....

Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.

People are not gonna bother educating someone who won't educate themselves, especially when what is said is so completely incorrect they have no idea where to even begin.

[–] Arrakis@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago
[–] Brkdncr@artemis.camp 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.

Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.

Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yea but it's not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn't matter as much with how the space is now and how Google's being better in the past wasn't necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.

Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn't be having this discussion, but "free" markets go brrr.

[–] sheogorath@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me it's still hit or miss when you're searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn't scan as often and so wouldn't have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don't find something on one, I'm pretty surprised how I don't find it in more or less the same way on the others

"disrupted" 🤢

[–] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Annoyingly, Google has gotten so bad over the past year, that I basically give up trying to find a good result half the time. And the other half, I have to spend 10 minutes retrying search terms to find anything that either isn't an ad, an embedded side-scrolling bullshit thing, and irrelevant websites.

[–] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago

I've tried Kagi search a few times this last couple of weeks and was reasonably impressed. If it works out I'd be happy to pay a few pennies for better product recommendations

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Microsoft never stopped trying. They made a reasonably good product and even had some monopoly power behind it. But still couldn’t succeed.

[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

To be clear, when referring to a reasonably good product, which iteration of their attempts are you describing?

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I dunno... if someone came around and made a site that works like Google did originally, I think they'd have a shot at taking over. Google has changed so much over the years, it's barely even recognizable anymore. One of the things that is pretty common with them, too, is taking something a lot of users like as-is, and then completely reworking the UI/UX until nobody wants to use it.

[–] promodel@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

kagi.com - I think they are taking their shot!

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I use duckduckgo and no matter what you do it gives localised results. They are getting worse and the only reason to do this is to make more money so I know they are taking data, selling data, or pushing ads or all three.

[–] Willy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

timing is everything. always has been.

[–] Ddhuud@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, the other part of the sucking is because of direct Google involvement.