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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Eternal September? The internet was still great from that regard (tons of people "not producing content for money"), no big central control, no FB/Google/Twitter/etc, until around the time we got Google.

There was AOL of course, but that was mostly mocked by people on the "real" internet.

>and while this would certainly be a regression for the society at large

Actually, it might be a huge improvement. Technofiles will never go for this, but after a point technology in a societal context can have not just diminishing returns but even spoil good things (like going to a concert in your 20s without being glued to a smartphone screen).

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>The internet was still great... until around the time we got Google.

Not that I necessarily agree with your assertion, it's worth emphasizing the reason that Google took off: search just plain sucked before Google came on the scene.

Personally, my only real issue with Google is the decline in precise search result quality since they got rid of the + operator.

You can search for a precise phrase using quotation marks. You can also prevent Google from returning assumed synonyms of a word by putting that single word in quotes.

The big difference is that now you are often mislead by synonyms. Previously it would return 0 and you'd think for second and find alternative keyword. Now you'll spend minutes until you realise that what you are seeing is nonsense. Also, removal of some keywords completely messed this up again.

Hang on, if I search for "sausages" does Google only return sausages, or does it return chorizo, hotdogs, bangers etc?

What's the difference between "sausages" and 'sausages', or does this not make sense for single words?

yes.

> The internet was still great ... until around the time we got Google.

Depressingly accurate.

Alas, the probable trajectory is not all-out war on Google, but rather a number of plausible threats followed by a hammering out of market boundaries followed by a tacit non-compete between the players.

> The internet was still great ... until around the time we got Google.

Correlation but not necessarily causation.

You have to admit that after establishing its dominance Google started to dictate its own rules for web design, rather than adapting to the pages people already had. Google's algorithm that places incoming links above anything else for relevance is singlehandedly responsible for forum spambots, fake websites, and the dynamic where new websites have no chance to compete with something established, unless they run some kind of marketing campaign to "seed" the links.

I wasn't going for causation (or even correlation). Just to convey the general time frame.

The Eternal September started in 1993, and I don't know if you remember what the internet was like at that time, but I do and I wouldn't go back to it.

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