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.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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
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      1 year ago

      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
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        1 year ago

        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
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          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
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        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.