In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the number of pages that linked to a page meant something).
In the age of GMail beta, Google was my hero and I wanted to work for them. They were doing new things with the browser. First was Google Pack, which included necessary software like Firefox. Then Google introduced Chrome, which was even better.
Both began to descend. I don't know, they became slower and clunkier, as if they were designed by the denizens of any number of companies. Google had about 50,000 people at this point.
Recently, I can't stand even to read Google's documentation, because of its (1) bureaucratic wordiness, and (2) cluttered layout that reminds me of that video about Microsoft redesigning the iPod box. In the early 2000s, Google was a maverick. Nowadays, Google is hard to distinguish from any other corporate giant.
To put things in perspective, Google was founded in 1998, making them 22 years old in September. The "Halloween Documents" were released in August 1998, when Microsoft was 23.
Google is indistinguishable from any other corporate giant because they now are any other corporate giant.
Did anyone seriously think an Ad company would go any other way? It's the scummiest of industries. It was always just a matter of time.
And now we've given (allowed, stood by, whatever) them ALL the data for >50% of our cellular users for the last 10+ years. I'm an Android user too. Oof.
I would agree. The quality of the company seems inversely proportional to the number of employees, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...
In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the number of pages that linked to a page meant something).
In the age of GMail beta, Google was my hero and I wanted to work for them. They were doing new things with the browser. First was Google Pack, which included necessary software like Firefox. Then Google introduced Chrome, which was even better.
Both began to descend. I don't know, they became slower and clunkier, as if they were designed by the denizens of any number of companies. Google had about 50,000 people at this point.
Recently, I can't stand even to read Google's documentation, because of its (1) bureaucratic wordiness, and (2) cluttered layout that reminds me of that video about Microsoft redesigning the iPod box. In the early 2000s, Google was a maverick. Nowadays, Google is hard to distinguish from any other corporate giant.