These kinds of articles pop up all the time, along with all the "Web 3" ideas, and all of them seem to view the past with a sort of rose-tinted nostalgia, forgetting that the corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, i.e. grow into enormous ungovernable conglomerates and wield godlike omnipotent control over the flow of information.
As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition.
Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.
>Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing;
Back in 1998, Google's algorithm ("pagerank") of weighting href backlinks using linear algebra was revolutionary compared to the other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, etc that were built on TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)[1].
The more simplistic TF-IDF approach of older search engines suffered from "keyword stuffing" such as invisible words at the bottom of the HTML page for SEO. Google's new search engine was an immediate improvement because it surfaced more relevant pages that beat the useless pages with keyword stuffing. At the time, Google Search results were truly superior to the junk Yahoo and AltaVista was showing.
A compelling story, but Google became profitable in 2001 shortly after the introduction of AdWords, three years after its founding. At the time their funding was $25 million.
> the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever
Not following the thread here. Do you think the web would be less monopolized if Altavista or Yahoo had won?
I don't believe it makes any difference at all. The transition from a free web, made by people for the people, to the collection of corporate walled gardens we have today would have happened regardless, it was simply the natural progression of things - that we failed to recognize and avert in time. Initiatives like making computing personal again are exactly what's needed if we want to go back.
> Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing;
Google was revolutionary when it launched. It was clean, super fast, and had way superior search results. It blew the competition away. Within weeks of Google's launch techies started scolding people for using AltaVista or Yahoo, when they should be using something better.
Oh yeah — who doesn't remember all the "Pamela Anderson" meta tags (thousands) people would put into their HTML files to drive up the page rankings on the various web crawlers.
So easy to game the system before Google. (Now easy again judging by the shitty results I've been getting for years now.)
I find it hard to imagine that today's iteration of Google is what Larry and Sergey had in mind when they initially founded the company, or what Paul Buchheit had in mind when he was working on the earliest forms of Gmail. I don't think that "Don't be evil" was tongue-in-cheek back then.
The company had a legitimate business model, was innovative, agile and profitable from early on. It rightly earned a lot of respect.
But something went wrong at some point. It's debatable when, why or how, but it happened.
The reason for Google's massive success has nothing to do with the business acumen or the innovative ideas of its founders - it's because a) in the 1990s, antitrust law in the US was pretty much dead and Google came in at just the right time to take advantage of this fact and make world domination their goal from the outset, and b) Google used their excess reserves of cash to host the worlds most popular website with no ads and no real revenue stream for many years, taking a risky and extremely expensive gamble that their slowly-cultivated vendor lock-in would eventually recoup their losses many, many times over, which it did. In other words, it was dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. Just like Larry and Sergey, the trust fund babies born to wealthy successful parents with lucrative careers from the 80s tech boom.
That isn't true. People made fun of software that showed ads. Exception was shareware, but it did that only for the software itself.
The braindead hordes accepting things they couldn't really understand did have a negative effect on overall quality.
Just before someone argues against the misanthropy in my comment, some of my most loved family members belong to the braindead horde. I love them, but their failure in education makes the landscape worse for everyone. And it is also very visible and not something imaginary.
Today we accept our OS spying on us, showing us ads, paternalizing its users with updates and the whole mobile catastrophe is a dilemma in itself. Smartphones are powerful devices but the software landscape disabled a whole dimension of software and is responsible for unnecessary waste.
Yes, it got worse on the software department. A few less driver issues because a lot of companies and hardware suppliers were consolidated is not a win.
And honestly, it isn't really hard to notice these changes at all.
Google is a good example. It didn't have better search, but its site wasn't plastered in ugly advertising from top to bottom. This was quite a factor in its success. Clean, fast, good. Not the nightmare it did on Android, where every app onboarding is a horror story in a thousand popups. There are profound differences in quality, intelligence and ability.
As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition.
Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.