• Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I think people forget how awful google pre ~2008 was. Not in terms of the bullshit they do nowadays, just in quality of results really.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Huh. I used it pretty much since the start and I certainly don’t recall it being that bad? Like you got a lot of relevant content up front usually.

      • notfromhere@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        I feel like you had to learn how to use it, operators and phrasing etc. They dumbed it down with search suggestions and even further by changing search terms to synonyms, and now outright ignoring terms. Height of Internet search was definitely pre 2008. More like 2005.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        If you had the right query, yes. But getting there if you didn’t know the exact words in the website used to take a number of attempts and google-fu. By early 2010s this was vastly improved.

    • anachronist@midwest.social
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      6 months ago

      I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.