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.

      • 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.