Copyright 1999

Also you can totally trust them because the corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”

was
- They remove the "don't"
We stopped trusting them when the canned that.
- In retrospect, it was nice of them to announce the change to everybody.
It never was a motto, it always was a command (because Google knows everything, like Santa)

Fuck, Google has been around for over 25 years.

I was just wondering if this was a picture of a history book.
Yeah, I started using Gmail when it was invite only.

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

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.
- 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.
- Mmmmm... Downward slop.
- 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

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.

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:text
  
  for Google
  
  I do know that Qwant at least does support the latter, sort of.
What does it do?
- Depends on whether he fired six shots or only five. Punk.
- Takes you to the first result... it used to be useful.

(This was before AdSense)

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't~~ be evil

even at this time there were ads and sponsored links no?

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
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?

That 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.

Google: Why is my SMS messenger sending packets to Google?

I think I remember seeing this back when it came out. What was this printed in?