Happy Birthday Google, or is it?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Search, Blog, Google, Internet on
Is Google really 11 years old? Is it really that long ago that we all used AltaVista and couldn’t imagine anyone doing search better than that? The answer to both questions is yes, possibly.
Happy 11th birthday Google. Well at least I think that’s right. Maybe.
To celebrate, Google has a special logo of course. No UFO inspired nonsense to get the conspiracy theorists conspiring, just a rather clever use of a double ‘l’ to represent the number 11 instead. Nice. I actually prefer this one to the 10th birthday effort which seemed a bit forced, although the cupcake for the first o was inspired, replacing the e with an 0 just didn’t work on anything but a surrealist level.
The odd thing is, of course, that the 10th birthday logo did not appear on the 27th September 2008, but instead celebrations started on the 2nd. I’m a little confused as to why that might be, especially as the Google domain name was registered on the 15th September while company incorporation papers were submitted on the 4th. If anyone has a clue as to how Google picks a birthday date, please do let me know.
Actual date aside, Google was definitely launched upon the world in 1998 and this got me to remembering what I was doing PG: pre-Google. Well, I was doing the same as everyone else who was online at the time, and that was thinking that AltaVista was the dogs doo-dahs. Nobody expected the Google upstart, despite the wonderfully minimalist interface, to be anything other than a minor distraction in the world of search back in 1998. If you were not using AltaVista, and I’d have to ask why not as it really did rock back then, you were probably searching courtesy of some other long forgotten by most engine with names like Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot or even Yahoo! OK, the latter has not been forgotten although it did go through a period when most of us would have been happy to forget it, truth be told. Oddly, back in 1997, Microsoft wasn’t really considered a search player although the launch of MSN Search around the same time as Google if my memory serves me well did start to change all that.
Now, and I’ll admit it, I cannot imagine using anything other than Google as my primary search weapon. It’s always primed and ready to fire, generally hits the target without too much collateral damage, and I don’t need to read an instruction manual before I pull the trigger. Happy Birthday Google - I wonder if you will still be king of search in another 11 years, or whether you will just be remembered as the new AltaVista?
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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[…] IT PRO: Blogs: Davey Winder: Happy Birthday Google, or is it? www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/daveyw/2009/09/27/happy-birthday-google-or-is-it – view page – cached , Is Google really 11 years old? Is it really that long ago that we all used AltaVista and couldn’t imagine anyone doing search better than that? The answer to — From the page […]
Comment by - September 29, 2009 on 8:14 am
My mind is blank when I meet these problems, even so I can’t remember which day is my birthday.
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 7:52 am
i like
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 7:53 am
nice
Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 7:58 am
Thanks for the post. I am sad that i’ve found this blog very late. By the way be late happy birthday to google.
Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 10:11 am
Thanks for the post.
Comment by hooher tod - September 5, 2011 on 3:11 pm
Yes there should realize the reader to RSS my feed to RSS commentary, quite simply
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