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Comment by SanderNL | Hacker News Reader

I don’t remember Google being this interesting. Ever. It was a good service and very useful, but nothing like this. It was not astonishing. The tech was mildly interesting, but most of all very useful.

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I disagree. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude ahead of everyone else's when it came out. Like it actually worked vs all the others that did some mediocre keyword matching and could be moderately useful if you were good with boolean operators.

Gmail, which another poster described, was also mind blowing at the time.

Google Maps, and the fact that you could scroll across a map smoothly was mind blowing at the time, and really redefined what was possible with xml http request, and "web 2.0"

These are the biggest that come to mind and its somewhat telling that Google Maps was the latest, and I believe launched in 2005 or 2006.

There were lots of other products that were less impressive, but definitely a step ahed of just about everyone out there- google finance, the "office" suite- do kids in school even install MS Office anymore? It used to be a defacto must have piece of software, I haven't had it on a personal machine in years now...

And a lot of stuff that looked like it was going to be something very big, but died on the vine. Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Image search come to mind here.

Then from a pure tech side of things, Go, Kubernetes, Node.js, the early hadoop and "big data" tools, all came from Google as well. But maybe getting back to your point, their backend stuff has not really turned into an "astonishing" user facing product in quite some time.

Google earth was super cool when it came out.

Being able to spin a globe, find our house, visit any place in the world.

Maybe it was less useful compare to maps, but definitely more fun.

Yeah I had forgotten until after I submitted that earth was an entirely separate project. There was a lot of other cool stuff. I remembered and tried to use linux.google.com a few weeks ago and found out it's no longer a thing.

Also Google labs, I remember playing with their set tool all the time. You add a few items of a set, and it added more. Ie 4-5 grunge bands and it will spit out 10 more.

I will say though more recently, when I first got in a car with Android Auto I was like I will never be able to live without this again. It may sound silly but just the fact that the time synced with my phone I was like take my money. Even more recently the call screen feature on the pixel 6 and 7 was just pure surprise and delight. I finally feel like I am the boss of my phone again. Google lens and translate are actually quite impressive but kind of niche use cases.

There were a lot of little things, Google desktop which was pretty cool for awhile and it kind of fulfilled what MS was trying to do with it's "Active Desktop."

My point being that maybe everyone (including myself) is a little harsh but google is still building interesting things. The pace seems to have slowed down though and they aren't leaps ahead of the pack anymore.

Gmail launched on 1st of april and was thought to be a joke since it gave you a gitabyte (I think) of storage wheras email providers like hotmail gave you 50mb.

Chrome launching was also a pretty big deal, I recall.

Google earth was nice too, and street view. It was hard to believe at first.

But Chrome was just a re-hash of firefox, nothing exciting there.

Kind of agree. The last time I think I was this stoked to play with a mass market tech tool like this was street-view, and before that Google Earth.

No, Chrome was a revelation when it came out. It was way faster than Firefox and it had many great features we now take for granted, like isolated tabs, popup blocking etc.

Revisionist history. Firefox had a built-in pop up blocker in 2003, years before Chrome was even a seed in Sundar’s balls. I know because I used it. Chrome was and is a step back, foisted on people with dark patterns, back in the day having speed by sacrificing features like extensibility and customisability.

Now you're the one revising history. Separate processes per window and process isolation was a big deal in early Chrome. Yes, Google has taken away much of the user control that made Chrome good and replaced it with things that optimize for the comfort of their advertising model.

But there's also a reason software people switched to Chrome for a long while. It was just better. It's not anymore. I switched back to Firefox when Chrome broke ad blocking.

Chrome might have been slightly better than Firefox, but not ground breaking like google earth, street view, gmail etc.

I remember everyone being excited about it suggesting searches on the address bar and suggesting websites in it you had never previously visited. Every other browser only autocompleted addresses you had visited before.

isolated tabs and popup blocking (which firefox already had) were not ground breaking in any way. They were implementation details. By that point, Firefox was stable enough to not make a big difference if it was isolated tabs or not.

was stable enough and slow

building a slightly faster browser is not ground breaking... I feel like people were just excited about anything coming out of google, back then. But it was not a revolution in browsers or anything like that. Chrome only got the upper-hand in browser wars because they install it on all the android devices(and not being able to uninstall it) - which I am not sure how they got away with, they should have been kept in check by anti-monopoly measures.

A re-hash of Firefox?

I am a Firefox user now, and I was a Firefox user when Chrome came out, but Chrome was miles ahead of Firefox in pretty much most things that mattered for most people, especially performance and usability.

Chrome was a revolution for the web.

Gmail also had a live counter showing your storage space increasing every few seconds. The storage space definitely seemed astronomical relative to the competition at that time.

Hotmail only offered 2MB for a long time. Then Yahoo started offering 250MB which seemed crazy. So when Google offered effectively unlimited storage, it really did seem like a joke.

Compared to every other search engine, it suddenly seemed like Google had everything that was on the web, and it was likely to find whatever obscure thing you were looking for and put it as the first result. It really did feel like magic compared to everything else, and I remember hearing many people who spent very little time on the internet also talk about how amazed they were.

Google search probably is a better service than it originally was, but the combination of SEO and the rapid increase in complete garbage online probably explains why searching disappointing so much of the time now. Sadly they've also removed a lot of powerful features such as operators, and integrated calculations that were similar to Wolfram Alpha.

Did you use Dogpile, Ask Jeeves or Yahoo search and try to get useful information out of them? Webrings were still a thing where a website about birds or something would have a list of other sites that had similar indie - and that was how you browsed the web as the search engines weren't good. Until Google.

OK, but dogpile was pretty damn cool. I just recall it being a little slow.

What was Google's email/chat crossover called, which had conversation threads visualized? Besides, Google's Graveyard is impressive and witness to Google's innovation abortions. https://killedbygoogle.com

Google Wave?

That was exciting

Google Wave?

yes, that was so wild. What a great tool this could have been.

It is called Google Docs now.

Wave was a good tech demo, but only alter they figured out what the tech can be used for.

The apache version isn't developed anymore but probably still runs

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