A Look Back at Google
I’m not that old. At least, I don’t think I am. I still can walk on my two legs without using a cane. I have regular bowel movements, and all my body parts are working as they should without external aid. For now. In spite of this fact, I have personally witnessed momentous technological changes, as many other individuals who were born before the beginning of the millennium have. Although I am certainly not the only exception, I would like to briefly take a moment to reflect about how much Google, specifically “Google Search”, has revolutionized our world.
This is a short piece addressed specifically to millenials (those born in the 1990s+), who are so deeply embedded in the 21st century without necessarily being quite aware of how different things were before their time, and of how many things they might be taking for granted which in fact prior generations did not have access to. These are slight and subtle changes that often go unrecognized given their ‘recency’, but which are important to contemplate and discuss. Millenials have a great deal of soft social power, but given the absence of awareness of what came before them, they might be falsely presuming that this power had always been available to all. It has not, and these stories are meant to illustrate that very point.
Google, in short, made digital information significant and meaningful.
The internet in the 1990s was a really neat thing. Although there had always been communication between computers, up until then it had been a pain. Operating systems of the 1980s on different computers were as a whole incompatible, and so connecting two computers was nothing short of a miracle. All personal computers were isolated silos, and the only meaningful exchange of information were the programs you could purchase for your box. This was the era of the wireline rotary telephone; the cellphone as a tool that could be used from anywhere was only know to a very small subset of the population. I had once actually seen one , and was able to use it, but saw it more as a ‘CB radio’ given its large bulky body the weight of a textbook that was not unnoticeable to carry around.
I remember having a Commodore 64K computer—a computer motherboard underneath a keyboard—that could not hold any information except that which was provided to it at the beginning of the sessions. Floppy disks at the time were bendable five inch 'paper' disks of less than 128k. They were revolutionary for the time because they would load information much faster into the computer than tape drives, which would take ‘forever’ (5 - 10 minutes) to load even a simple program into the computer. Only big corporations used hard drives, so they were not known to most individuals. Direct personal information was thus also transitory, and if you could not ‘print it out’ or ‘magneticize it out’, you would lose your information every time you shut down your computer. The damage to your floppy disk reader/writer was effectively a catastrophic event given that any amount of work done could not be saved for later use; it is a functionality that is today taken for granted.
It was not all that bad however.
You had an ‘intimate’ connection to the computer in that you had direct and complete access to the chips and boards; assembly language on the Commodore 64K was always only a few steps away and could easily be used. Though programming was mainly done on Basic, it was an interesting challenge for a young novice. The notion of a ‘sprite’—an image which could be assigned ‘object’ properties—was ‘revolutionary’ at the time. I programmed a simple QBert game that although obviously lacked the sophistication of the original, it had been relatively easy to do. Nice. Although getting the Commodore 64k to play a Bach piano piece was ‘easy’ by comparison, the hard part had been to plot out the song’s music notes to their respective frequencies, and then input these values into the instruction set. (The result was also equally impressive.) My mother, as you would expect, loved that one.
Programming a type of ‘word processor’ to print out endless address labels for my father, who was then heading of Amnesty International, probably did more to show him the ‘value’ of computing than any other explanation could have done. He belonged to the mid 20th century, and his IBM typewriter with its unique Futura/Dido font was a part of him that he would never let go of. Even towards the end of his life, you would see him typing on that old machine, cranking out case after case for some soft of civil rights legal defense. That long list of computer printed labels saved him and his associates a great deal of time, which was then used for organizing meetings and other activities. The notion of a ‘labor savings device’ could not have been more clearly established in that example.
Yet in spite of all of these enormous and revolutionary benefits, finding information was not easy. To say that it was ‘hard’ is an understatement.
The public birth of the internet in the 1990s suddenly brought A FLOOD OF DATA onto the public domain, but all of this data access was basically worthless because it was non-searchable. It was ‘locked’ within the confines of the computer without being easily accessible to ‘humans’. If you did not already know where to turn to find the data—the exact webpage that already held the piece of data you sought—you could easily spend hours searching for information without ever finding anything meaningful to your exact search. Not minutes but HOURS, literally. All that vast quantity of information was tantalizing and frustrating meaningless because it was effectively hidden. Literally looking for a needle in a haystack was worthless because it took so much time.
I remember sitting at a terminal doing search for the first time on AltaVista, the leading search engine at the moment. I still recollect being in awe of the internet, and the vast amount of information potentially available at my fingertips. Netscape Navigator was ‘a thing of the future’ in that it made browsing the internet so easy to do: to go from one web link to another, while at the same time retaining a history of all your activities online, so that at any given point, you could go back to any prior state of your search. “Wow, this is cool.”, I thought to myself at the time.
Yet, in spite of all that power and data, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was looking for (the search query) as this was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember sitting in front of the computer looking at the AltaVista results and thinking “This is totally worthless.” Every result that I got back had absolutely nothing to do with what I had been searching for. I knew Boolean searches, combination of phrases and terms “and”, “or” , “*”, but none of that seemed to affect the search engine outputs. I could , of course, endlessly sift through the hundreds of pages the search engine had found, but this was obviously a waste of time. Computers can easily generate so much data, that to be ‘locked’ onto this data is to effectively be imprisoned in a type of jail, given the actual amount of time one would have to spend to obtain the desired results.
“I can better spend my time.”, I thought to myself. So I got off the computer, and went on with my business. Whatever the internet could be, it had not yet become that.
Fast forward a few years later, to about 1999. I was at a science library doing some research, when an old librarian suggested that I give “Google” a try. I could only reply “What?!” as the name was completely new to me. She kindly noted there was a revolutionary new product she was testing out, and showed me the web page. As you might expect, I not impressed at first given the web page’s relative simplicity: multicolored letters with a simple text entry box. “Weird but let’s give it a try,” I decided. I typed in my search query, not really expecting much of a results. On that very first search, I got EXACTLY what I was looking for.
“WOW!”, I thought to myself. This is something special.
In light of the vast amount of fruitless data that other search engines spat out, Google was providing me meaningful information in that it was EXACTLY the data I was looking for. The notion that you would be endless trapped in a ‘computer jail cell’ by digital information flashed out of existence that very moment. Digital information had suddenly become meaningful and relevant.
THAT, my dear millenials, is what Google did for you in 1998.