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Author Topic: Imagine if Google never existed  (Read 27475 times)

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Offline Deep Toaster

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Imagine if Google never existed
« on: September 05, 2014, 02:33:42 am »
I was typing a search query into Firefox's address bar (note that this is not even Chrome's Omnibar) when I started thinking about how much I really rely on Google. I'd say a good 70% of the things I type into my address bar aren't URLs at all but are meant for Google. That's really how we browse the web now, isn't it?

If Google (and other search engines I'm assuming) never existed, I wouldn't know 99% of the things I know about computers and the internet. I'd almost certainly never come across a site like Omnimaga—imagine the link chain you'd have to take to get there from a site like Facebook or Wikipedia's main page!

Of course, that's assuming I'd have heard of Facebook or Wikipedia at all, or that anyone would have, without Google. The Verge ran an interesting piece about a browsing competition without search (basically the "Wikipedia Game" across the entire Internet), and you can imagine how difficult that must be. They say that the Internet is all connected by a titular Web of links, but really it's Google gluing it all together.

A final scary thought: When Google went down for less than five minutes last year (99.999% uptime, which is absolutely incredible if you think about it), traffic on the Internet as a whole dropped by 40%.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2014, 11:35:35 am by Deep Thought »
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Offline Sorunome

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2014, 05:45:58 am »
You have some bad bb-code bold close tag in there :P
And yeah, there is a reason there are search engines, people use them TONS.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2014, 12:20:23 pm »
Browsing internet with no search engine would be a nightmare x.x
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Offline Keoni29

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #3 on: September 05, 2014, 01:59:30 pm »
I have a book about the internet that dates back to the time before google. It has a list of interesting websites in the back. Remember that every geocities page had a "links" page? That's how the early internet worked: you'd include large lists of websites you find interesting in your website/book.

This book came out in 1992. The google experiment started 4 years later and did not get popular until much later.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2014, 02:01:56 pm by Keoni29 »
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Offline Eiyeron

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #4 on: September 05, 2014, 02:04:05 pm »
If Google never existed? I guess that Yahoo, Ask or Bing would have been the core of Internet instead of Big G...
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Offline Keoni29

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #5 on: September 05, 2014, 02:14:05 pm »
Possible. Yahoo and ask launched in 1995. This even before google development had started. Bing is a more recent one trying to be like google >.< It launched in 2009.
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Offline Eiyeron

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #6 on: September 05, 2014, 02:14:56 pm »
Yeah, I know, but I could have said Lycos or any search engine that could or already existed by this time.
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Offline Keoni29

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #7 on: September 05, 2014, 02:26:23 pm »
I think it has a lot to do with the name and the choices of the company. I associate Ask with its annoying toolbar that comes with free software. Same goes for babylon. (Babylon is just pure evil with a forced userbase.) Google annoys you with their chrome browser from time to time, but it's actually a good browser, so just download it :P Yahoo's front page is too convoluted. Most people like the clean look of the google search front-page. I dunno, but google just never annoyed me enough to switch. That's about it.
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Offline Eiyeron

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #8 on: September 05, 2014, 02:30:22 pm »
Same for me on every points, but specially on Yahoo's homepage : it's too distracting from the main site's functionality : search things in things in the world of Intertubes.

(Haaaaaate babyloooon)
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #9 on: September 05, 2014, 08:00:04 pm »
Quote from: Keoni29 on September 05, 2014, 01:59:30 pm
I have a book about the internet that dates back to the time before google. It has a list of interesting websites in the back. Remember that every geocities page had a "links" page? That's how the early internet worked: you'd include large lists of websites you find interesting in your website/book.

This book came out in 1992. The google experiment started 4 years later and did not get popular until much later.
Yeah, I wonder if anybody remembers back when Omnimaga still had a links section? Until April 2006 there was a page just for other calc sites. This is the 1st version: http://xlib.mtv-music-generator.com/omnimagaoldsite/links_v1.html

I think that today, most people no longer link to other sites like this because they figured out that in 2 years, all of them will have ceased to exist. Nowadays people just have an affiliates section or something.


Also, does anyone remember back when webrings were still big?
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Offline Deep Toaster

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Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #10 on: September 05, 2014, 08:23:32 pm »
I learned about both of those things through TI-Freakware—not only does it still have a massive collection of calculator links, but it also at one point have a bug where the front page kept redirecting to its webring page :P
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Offline AzNg0d1030

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #11 on: September 05, 2014, 09:19:44 pm »
If Google didn't exist is like saying I'm the King of England

:)
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Offline Princetonlion.tibd

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #12 on: September 05, 2014, 09:52:34 pm »
if Google didn't exist, baidu would be here :trollface:
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Offline Juju

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #13 on: September 06, 2014, 10:32:13 am »
I remember when everyone used AltaVista, it was probably as big at the time as Google's search engine is now. Now it was bought by Yahoo, I think.
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Offline Princetonlion.tibd

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Re: Imagine if Google never existed
« Reply #14 on: September 06, 2014, 12:03:16 pm »
Google is shown as a virus site sometimes on the computer I use. I just use yahoo :P
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