Do you remember your first Google?
Siva sez, "For the book he is writing called The Googlization of Everything, Siva Vaidhyanathan wants to know:"
Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression? Please use the comments over on The Googlization of Everything to tell me stories. As Mudbone (Richard Pryor's character) used to say, "you only remember two times, your first and your last."Link (Thanks, Siva!)
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Man, I can't remember at all the first time I used google. All I can remember is I was impressed.
(...And First. Sorry, but I never did that before and so seemed appropriate to say first my first time on a topic about "firsts" :) )
i think my first google was really on a search engine called 'alta vista'. i'm sure it was porn related...
I remember my friend Erik, a 20th-level sysadmin, talking to me about this company that wanted to organize all the information in the world, ever, and promised not to be evil. That would be circa 1997-1998?
I don't remember the first time I used it, but I do remember how quickly it replaced AltaVista as my primary search engine.
I'm so not disappointed in Google. Go them!
My first Google was in late 94 or early 95. I remember my slightly-more-Internet-aware coworker Joel saying "Check this out..."
The capcha is particularly apropos: "Troubling Stocks"
The first time I heard about google was in my freshman science class... I believe in 1999 or 2000. The teacher asked us what search engine we were all using and then (roughly) explained why we should use google instead.
I first heard about Google on a blog, I think (were they even called blogs then?). I never went back to yahoo.com again. I also remember the first time I tried Google maps, I never went back to yahoo maps after that either.
Anonymous at #4,
How did you use google two years before they wrote the code?
Seems like it was sometime in spring of 2001. I remember how hilarious it was seeing 'Goooooooooogle' on the bottom of the results page for the very first time.
I remember the first web browser I saw.. it was 1993 or 1994, I was in a computer lab at my high school, probably goofing off with irc or gopher, and I thought it looked like one of those stupid hypercard things the mac people were always so excited about.. That's why I'll never be a venture capitalist.
I still have the first url I ever wrote down, it was for a beastie boys site somewhere in the indiana.edu domain, and it even had a :80 ...
Google wasn't that memorable.. it juts replaced altavista, which replaced lycos, which replaced yahoo (for me anyway)..
I hope somebody replaces google - not because I don't like them, but because better is always better.
I'm fairly certain I would have migrated gradually from Altavista to Google, and I can remember seeing Google's home page for the first time and thinking 'man, that's fast'. I can also remember doing an ongoing comparative trial between Altavista and Google and stopping using Altavista when Google started returning more up to date and, indeed, relevant results. This would also have been the same time as I got my first Hotmail account, pre Microsoft - I was simong@ but forgot the password...
I'm a bit of a young cat. I think my first google was when I was fed up with IE. I looked for alternatives and downloaded Firefox 0.8
The rest is history. In fact, my first google may have been boingboing. I've been a "ghost reader" for years. I always check this, my yahoo mail, my myspace, and double viking first thing in the morning.
It didnt take long for me to try and google for porn. Probably was one of first things to google no doubt. Lets face it the majority of men also googled for porn(some form of it) within the first 24 hours of using it.
The first time I used Google was because I saw the big "powered by Google" icons at the bottom of Yahoo! searches. When I saw that Google gave the same results, I just started using that directly instead of using Yahoo! This was way back in high school, so I was probably using it to search for video games, and MUDs.
Like those who actually remember Google launching, I can't remember my first search, but I do remember it replaced Altavista for me (almost immediately).
Of course, before Altavista I used Webcrawler, the first full-text search engine for the web. (That was way back in '94/'95).
I remember not being able to spell google, but eventually being introduced to it by a computer art professor.
I received an unsolicited e-mail from Google addressed to my AOL account, inviting me to try this new search engine that had just been launched (I think it was circa 1997 or 1998, but I'm not looking it up -- I'll bet I still have the e-mail). I hesitated for a while, being distrustful of spam, but finally did and was very impressed. I never used AltaVista again.
#9 JITROBUG: That's the same progression of my search engine history.
I remember Googling for Star trek episode, Mac shareware and gay porn in my first few sessions using teh googs... nothing that memorable or to be proud of. Certainly nerdy, though!
I don't really recall my first encounter with a search engine, but it was either yahoo, lycos, or altavista.
My first encounter with google was probably 6 or 7 years ago; I remember it was text and html only, like 400 bytes or something.. which is why I fell in love with it in the first place... I feel I'm slowly losing that love as the phrase "don't be evil" comes to mean less and less.
The first time I remember using Google was when I found a link to their Mac/Apple search, which doesn't even seem to exist anymore.
I was in grade school when google came out and I remember that at that time I had quite the fondness for Ask Jeeves. I think I liked that you could make Jeeves say funny things by asking dirty queries.
I'm glad that google saved me from that.
Ah, high school, Graphic Arts lab, 2001-ish... I think I was complaining about how slow Yahoo and Alta Vista searches were, and Mr. Bently suggested a new search engine "Google" because "it used all the other search engines or something."
Usually the Graphic Art's class involved long periods of nothing, so it was a good time spend on other homework. My first search was either for the "Marshall Plan" or "types of Schizophrenia."
It was 2000 for certain because I remember the co-worker who told me to use google instead of whatever engine I was using ... I only worked with this guy for a few months, so that's how I know.
Also, this guy married the girl my cousin basically stalked in college. Small world.
I think my first google was probably in '99 or '00, via one of those search pages with boxes that let you try out multiple engines. I had been waffling between Altavista and Lycos at the time, finding both of them pretty frustrating, as the search engines of that era were. When the Google results came up for the first time (I don't remember what I was searching for - probably something music related), I saw that the snippets of text beneath each link showed the context in which the search terms appeared in the page. And that was it. That one feature completely destroyed the competition, as far as I was concerned. It probably cut down on the number of needless clicks-though to irrelevant pages by tenfold. That, combined with the fact that there weren't stupid banner ads plastered all over the search pages, meant that I never looked back.
I remember that I used to do three searches (Altavista, the wired engine, and yahoo) and after about 3 weeks of google I realized that their algorithm was just much better. But this seems so silly because people had really great functioning search engines long before google. Google just combined the positives of yahoo with the completeness of altavista.
All I remember was that Google was FAST. You typed a search and the results page appeared instantly (in dail-up terms, anyway). I found it amazing that it could possibly search through so many websites in such a short time.
But AltaVista had a way better advanced search with all kinds of useful keywords. I don't think any web search engines let you do powerful queries any more.
I know I first used Google in college. I don't remember my first search, but I do remember that I was a little resistant to switching from Yahoo! simply because it was popular.
Yes, I'm one of those sorts of people. >.>
I remember trying to figure out what "I'm feeling lucky" did.
My first impression of Google was that it was yet another web site with a silly name (a trend that was already growing tiresome in the mid-late 90s), but that its interface was refreshingly clean, as opposed to something like HotBot with its ever-annoying acid-green background.
I don't remember my first search, but I remember being told about it via word-of-mouth. And having been a bit of a math geek in my teenage years, when I got home and tried to find it on the web, I assumed it was spelled "googol", resulting in some fellow's personal web page, which pointed me in the right direction.
OT, but I worked for a consulting firm in DC in the early 90's and I recall a fellow worker saying something to the effect "These internet websites - some should come with a way to search them efficiently".
what's google?
"toilet pics"
For a school project on ass-wash toilets. It didn't go well.
I don't remember what I first searched for, but I remember that someone told me about the "Interface Language" option. The first time I used Google, I was having a blast watching results come back as if written by Elmer Fudd.
Mine was "cheap power mac G3"
google is the site that really got me back on the net. I used prodigy for a while. Then I got a bit disenchanted by the web, only using alta vista or lycos every once in a while. But google came and totally changed my net usage forever.
I was Primary School.
Grade 6 it would have to be 1997. We went next door to the local high school and used their computer lab. My friends dad was teaching the class. It was some kind of lets teach the little kids how to use the internet thing, I already had the internet at home (I think about 1/4 of the kids did). Up until that class I used to switch between Alta-Vista, Lycos and yahoo. After that class I only very rarely used any of those 3 again.
Good times.
I'm not sure what we looked up. Something school related and boring.