The Dot com boom. Gold rush! Microsoft is king of the Desktop but AWOL on the web. Downloads are sooo slow. In NZ 28k was typical if you had it at all (today it's 50000k). People still buy print but mainly for the CD. Search was terrible, their home pages were ad-ridden chaotic mess. Some people used Copernic Agent to do multiple searches on Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Altavista, Compuserve (link if you miss the old internet https://www.compuserve.com/), /1
@nf3xn My first time using the Internet was in a library-like situation where I was invited to join a school class visiting this media lab. I remember having a cheat sheet with me that was included with a magazine. It contained all the important sites, like Altavista. They were using Silicon Graphics workstations; I remember how weird it was that hovering a text box with the mouse activated it.
Yes anti-trust. Total market dominance is having your name in the Oxford English Dictionary because your company name is synonymous with the action of searching for something on the internet. Microsoft had eaten Netscape but from the flames came the Firefox and eventually we got Chrome. Millions of hours lost trying to make IE work was about to end. By 2008 I had been on linux ten
years lol. /3
I feel it began to change after Snowden - vividly recall the Google "Fuck these guys". Privacy finally came into sharp relief. All the while Google were building the appengine and pioneering machine learning for search. I remember the Head of Search in a room with 30 developers sitting around the walls as the core search term bikeshedded the Seven Search Terms, thinking Steve Jobs would have a head fit. The game was up and 'Killed by Google' started to become a thing. /4
Ads by Google replaced their results. I never thought that they would be supplanted in my lifetime yet here we are and ironically at the hand of technology developed by them. Now we have Duckduckgo and an ever burgeoning raft of AI search companies.
That was a stream of thought that could be an article but needs far more time and effort than I am willing to invest right now. I guess upvote if you want the full deal, maybe I'll think about it.
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