defective yeti has me thinking about Google...
Way back when, in the before time, in the long long ago, I switched from using AltaVista to Google because, by comparison, AltaVista felt really cluttered and gimmicky and busy. AltaVista gave decent results, but I always got the feeling that I get when reading small local newspapers: there's some info in there, but really it's just a vehicle for crappy ads. On the other hand, Google's interface was almost as simple as could be: two buttons and a text box; the "Do You Feel Lucky?" button was the only clutter. And, when you clicked the Search button, Google just spit out a page of links and short excerpts. Nothing else.
So that means I am growing pretty dissatisfied with today's busy, cluttered, popup/animated, "no, I think I'll search for what I think you wanted to search for", ad platform, internet application host, portal, social media thingy, Google. Now, I get that Google has to eat, too; so I can tolerate the ads. It's all the other crap I wish they'd take away. When I go to Google.com, I'm there to search, not to envelop myself in a world of online productivity and social networking. I don't want every movement of my mouse to cause something to pop up or glow or change color. I don't want to recommend anything to other people. I don't want to see an unreadable preview of the page. I just want to click a link and see if it has the information what I wanted.
Get off my lawn, etc..
I’ve noticed that Google has gradually diminished the difference between the paid for, “ad” websites that appear at the top of some searches, and the plain old sites. You used to get some very noticeable shading, plus “AD” in sizable font to alert you that these were not search results but paid for ads. Now, just a tiny “ad” off to the right.
Feh, I’d complain more if corporate America didn’t pay for my salary.
Very well said. A few years ago, somebody in the office asked, in one of those idle office conversations, “What is going to replace Google?” And my answer was that there’s no company out there that can displace Google as it is; only Google can destroy itself.
And the cracks are showing, in just the way you describe. The only way Google is defatigable (shouldn’t that be a word?) is if they shift their priorities and cease to provide the most reliable, most accessible user experience. The more ads, the more intrusive doodads, the more noise that encroaches on their core offering of Useful Search Results, the more we start to long for an alternative.
Funny, I don’t remember Alta Vista having too many gimmicks. My memory is that Google’s search results were better than Alta Vista’s. But I was not really a power user at the time… Just STR getting more answers from the Google hits than the AV ones.
I remember being an AltaVista partisan until Google loomed into my airspace, so to speak. (Hell, I remember using rn and gopher, and before them, uucp and kermit. I grow old. Do I dare to eat a peach?)
altavista.com still exists, but appears to be just a front-end for yahoo search.