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Walking to a library would produce quicker and more accurate results.
The world before google (well, internet searching for info) and mobile phones.....kind of hard to remember.
From academic research to the everyday. Especially the every day. Meeting friends at a predetermined time and place that you couldn't change once you'd all left your landlines (how long did you wait before someone was MIA?), to go to an event where you couldn't double check when it opened/closed and navigating your way there with an A-Z.
Apparently one of the absolute top searches on Bing is “Google”.
I'd expect that to be right behind "download chrome" 😁
To be fair to Edge it's come a long way, I use it in work and have no complaints these days.
Bing still isn't great but then Google isn't either, the amount of utter dross you have to wade through means I often just give up these days. It can't even match a quoted sentence so what's the point?
As for Google as a company, never underestimate their willingness to just pull the plug on something regardless of how much has been invested in it. If the search engine started flagging I have no doubt they would absolutely pull the plug in an instant with no backup. They just canned Domains with absolutely no warning or reasoning (but at least offered a migration deal for existing customers).
I remember when WebCrawler and then Lycos launched. Then about a year later, AltaVista was an absolute revelation. I think I used that until Google came along. Set up my domain for the family on Google Apps for Domains as it was called then, now Google Workspace, and managed not to get kicked off last year when they suddenly decided all of us legacy non-commercial customers should pay for it, after promising it would be free forever. Not sure if I'll be able to leave the domain and the Workspace account in my will though, or even if the kids would have any idea what to do with it.
To be fair to Edge it’s come a long way, I use it in work and have no complaints these days.
That's because they threw the towel in and just repackage Chrome's rendering engine in a crappy MS interface! IE/Edge was still doing non standard html stuff only no one tested websites anymore against it, so it never worked properly. MS was still stuck in the days of 20 years ago when IE was the dominant browser and if they decided to do something non standard, everyone had to just follow them. Now people just check websites against Chrome and no one give a shit about MS browsers. Hence MS was forced to cave.
Still use google, though I got a lot more wary of it once I started working with SEO and realised how much of it is basically a scam. (highlight: discovering that if you searched for a specific university course that only my place offered, and included out university's name in the search query, we were on the second page of results behind a load of universities that had no equivalent course, but who had a decent SEO budget)
But is it just me or has it recently got drastically worse? Shopping seems to have been hived off into another thing, now I have "products" instead which just doesn't really work, it throws me a list of brands, and getting hits <without> shopping seems way reduced. Like, I just did a sample search and apart from "related searches" all of the top hits were a shop link, while the first information link was about 15th or 16th. So it's like I simultaneously have a general search that's crap because it's full of shopping links, but also searching for products is also worse.
Maybe I'll go back to infoseek 🙁
I remember when WebCrawler and then Lycos launched. Then about a year later, AltaVista was an absolute revelation.
Netscape for us at uni.
That was the first time I'd properly used the internet and email, 1997 arriving at university. 😳
Bits and pieces at school but it was so locked down and there was so little to actually access that it was near pointless.
I remember having to get a Yahoo email address when I did my year in industry in 1999/2000. It was a choice between Yahoo and Hotmail back then.
But is it just me or has it recently got drastically worse? Shopping seems to have been hived off into another thing, now I have “products” instead which just doesn’t really work
I have noticed that Google doesn't seem to work very well recently for shopping. Used to be excellent, but just doesn't seem to offer really obvious sites which sell that product any more.
I don’t use anything else these days, but is anyone not using Google at all?
Actually in the last year for quite a number of things, all work related. ChatGTP sees a lot of use.
Kinda depends what it is Im looking for.
Hence MS was forced to cave.
Which might look like justice to anyone in a company they put out of business in the earlier browser wars.
(Remember now I heard of Google from a guy called doug who did bmj's website of the week column, who said it's what all the cool kids were using. And it was pretty cool, changed how I worked.)
I just use edge. Seems to work.
I still have to use Internet Explorer for one work task. Each time I open it I need to close down the window in edge to make it work.
Used to use Firefox, but I'm logged into MS for work so that makes moving stuff around easier. I have my Google account for MyMaps on the laptop but I'm not allowed it on my work phone or tablet.
For mapping I use Google MyMaps, grid reference finder, open street map and bing maps. The aerial view between Google, bing and GRF varied depending on where you're looking, if ones crap the other may be good.
Bing also has the OS maps but their street view is gash.
I wish the favourites ribbon would give me a better symbol for bing maps.
I still have the Google app, but all of the browsers I use; Brave, Safari, Firefox, Ghostery Dawn, have DuckDuckGo set as default search, and I have the DuckDuckGo app as well.
I’ve also got an AI app installed, Perplexity, and while I don’t use it very often, when I have it’s returned nicely phrased speech-like answers.
I had to Google Duck Duck Go as I've never heard of it!
I went through a phase of trying out Lougel, but it never got me anywhere 😉
Can't believe none of you nostalgia folks have mentioned Dogpile! That was the power move IMO, before Google blew everyone else away...
Another one with a full name on my Gmail account from the days when invites were being very generously handed out on here. Even so I still get communications meant for blokes with the same name. One, a drama lecturer at a local university, the other a golf-playing member of an antidiluvian university fraternity in the US. I use google.
I used to work with someone who’d type Google into the URL bar, then click on the top link (obvs to Google) and then type whatever they were looking for into the Google home page. I tried explaining that they could just type the query straight into the url bar, but nope they always did it their way.
Aargh that reminds me, I knew someone who did the same but even more so: if you told them to go to "www.whatever.com" they'd go to Google and type the full address www and all into Google... now where's that disproportionate anger thread gone?
Edit: hmm, I tried it out of curiosity, seems like www.whatever.com leads to clicking the subscribe button on someone's stupid Youtube account. How annoying.
Dumb? Or smart? If they misspelt it, Google would still show them a link to the site (probably buried under a load of paid for ads for competitors of the site they're after, but hey).
Just completely computer illiterate and didn't know how browsers worked, I think. Watching it was like nails on a chalkboard. Tried to explain once but that went nowhere.
I went through a phase of trying out Lougel, but it never got me anywhere 😉
Try it in a hot tub.
if you told them to go to “www.whatever.com” they’d go to Google and type the full address www and all into Google
I've done that plenty of times. I've even googled Google 😆
Can’t believe none of you nostalgia folks have mentioned Dogpile! That was the power move IMO, before Google blew everyone else away…
I used Dogpile. It was my go-to before Google came along. It wasn't a search engine in its own right, it aggregated everyone else's results.
As far as nostalgia goes, I'm here from when a "search engine" was a fanfold printout that someone from the year above accidentally left on a desk. (I might still have one somewhere.)
I’ve even googled Google
Google "recursion" 😁
I might still have one somewhere.
Seems I do.
Google is so much better than anything else imo. I find it hard to believe, from a professional point of view, that they have managed to stay so far in front, for so long.
A while ago, I spent a fair bit of time in China. There is no Google available in China (and no Facebook or YouTube). Of course there are other search engines. But it’s amazing how much I missed a simple, effective google search.
I'm feeling very old. In a pub in Manchester and lots of the patrons are clearly younger than Google.
Try it in a hot tub.
Some kind of time machine would probably be useful too 😉
Google is actually not very good for me lately. I try to search for something specific, and it overwhelms my results with things only vaguely related to what I was looking at. Oh, you want to know how to release the ball joint on a 2019 Nissan Leaf? Here's how you can do it on a 1979 Datsun Cherry, that'll help you! Lots of other people have enjoyed that video!
I had to Google Duck Duck Go as I’ve never heard of it!
😳 It’s DuckDuckGo, no spaces. And it’s been around for ages! Since 2008, in fact, and I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it, it’s regularly recommended as an alternative to Google, because of its emphasis on privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
There’s another browser popped up for iOS, and I think Android, called Vivaldi. I’ve installed it on my iPad, but not my iPhone, yet; that’s undergoing a very long-winded restoration from iCloud backup. 🥱😴