Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.
I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers.
I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.
Well yes. That was one of the Great Inventions in Human History.
(Obviously not just page rank but also everything else that made it a working product, but that was the key innovation.)
I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
Every great invention is just a simple addition to all the accumulated knowledge in human history up to that point.
That hasn’t changed one bit. Google made it possible to find what you’re looking for. That was literally and figuratively revolutionary. This hasn’t changed either.