Greed is an insidious disease.
frrrrrr
Stuff like this makes me wish technology reached its peak in 2004
It can be confidently argued that the western American empire and it’s related industries (software and the Internet included) peaked in the 90s. We had a bit of hang time at the top and now it’s been free fall since around 2004.
That’s what they said in The Matrix. I guess they called it right.
Honestly it was pretty obvious coming up to y2k that it’d be the last generation of kids that had the same standard of living as their parents…
William Gibson and the entire cyberpunk genre pretty much nailed that stuff from day one. It was supposed to a warning though. Not a playbook.
It’s not all bad, though!
I ran Linux in 2004, and it was great, but it was such a “second-class citizen” desktop OS. The fact that Unreal Tournament and sequels actually worked on Linux felt amazing because it was such a break from the norm, whereas now gaming on Linux is actually a viable option.
Maybe you could flash the ROM on your phone in 2004, but afaik nowhere near the vibrant community you have now.
And self hosting then kinda meant, “I have an Apache server and IRC daemon listening” (the irony is that the self hosting community is so good now in part because of enshittification).
Programmable microcontrollers — with freely available, to ust IDE+libraries — are literally the price of a nice cup of coffee (3x ESP32 can be had for $14 on Amazon). How cool is that!?
I think there’s a lot of shitty stuff out there, and the shitty stuff probably outnumbers the cool stuff — but there’s world full of really, really cool stuff out there.
It did. We’re now on the steady downward slop of enshittification.
Fair but I just mean that Moore’s law should have died and the family Compaq should have been the peak. We wouldn’t have the capacity to run all this big data and spytech shit, at least not to the degree we have now
Mmmmm… Downward slop.
I know what I said!
Wow, I feel fucking old as hell. I remember when this was true and it’s what differentiated Google from the others.
Other search engines it was like page three, but Google had the right link, first choice, a lot of the time. Maybe you’d get down to the fourth or fifth link.
They took over the market, then adopted every bad practice that set them apart (SEO notwithstanding).
The “I’m feeling lucky button” was born from those days. I remember the old times, when it worked.
I also remember when you could tell people “It’s the third link down.” Because everyone would get the same results. Type this phrase into Google, these are the results you get.
I remember when search engines just sucked and it was hard to find anything, then I heard about google.standford.edu and the internet was good again.
don’tbe evilThat looks a lot like the textbook I got in University (which I started in '99). I can’t remember if it mentioned Google for sure, though. Yahoo and I think Alta-Vista were in there, along with things like Archie, Gopher, etc.
I think I remember seeing this back when it came out. What was this printed in?
Google: Why is my SMS messenger sending packets to Google?
Also you can totally trust them because the corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”
It never was a motto, it always was a command (because Google knows everything, like Santa)
was
They remove the “don’t”
sadly they aren’t quite comically evil yet
We stopped trusting them when the canned that.
In retrospect, it was nice of them to announce the change to everybody.
Fuck, Google has been around for over 25 years.
I was just wondering if this was a picture of a history book.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
And Douglas Adams was still alive.
Douglas Adams
Somehow I read this as Scott Adams and was confused for a minute… :-P
It’s crazy that the “I’m feeling lucky” button still exists, I probably haven’t clicked it in 20 years (though I’ve been using DDG for like the last five).
on ddg you can get the same function by adding an exclamation mark “!” (as in a !bang with no text)
Is there a site that lists all the keycuts (like keywords and shortcuts in 1) for such search engines?
Like
!for DDG and
site:textfor Google
I do know that Qwant at least does support the latter, sort of.
On DDG those words with the exclamation point are called !bangs, and you can search them by adding !bang to the search query. If you only put “!bang” without a query it takes to the landing page.
For other operators you’ll have to look at each search engine’s help pages.
What does it do?
Takes you to the first result… it used to be useful.
Takes you to a gambling site.
J/k it takes you to the first search result instantly, instead of a search results page.
I’m unsure if this includes sponsored links tbh
Either way these days it is very unlikely that the first result will have anything useful on it unless you’re just searching for some basic information like a celebrity’s age or stuff like that.
Depends on whether he fired six shots or only five. Punk.
(This was before AdSense)
even at this time there were ads and sponsored links no?
No. This is literally 25 years ago before it was monetized.
It was running on venture capital, betting that giving away search for free would drive Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and all the others out of business, leaving Google free to monopolize and enshittify.
Luckily, it’s illegal to sell products below what they cost in the United States,
so that didn’t happen.Edit: Shit. I keep forgetting when I’m posting in this timeline. We got “Cats” the CGI musical in this one, too, right?! Did we at least get the butthole version here?
I can remember a time that after a search, you’d just have a list of links. No extra boxes on the side or even an images tab, just the list of links. At the bottom of the page was the word “Google” and there would be more O’s, as they were links to other pages of results.
If there were sponsored links, it didn’t say so and you’d end up with different sites at the top of the list. So I don’t think way back there were.
Google brought AdSense years after that. At the time it wasn’t monetized.
No
