CmdrTaco's Journal: Thoughts on Google

In the last few weeks, news of Google's impending IPO has reached a fever pitch. Every news site is chatting about it. NPR won't shut up about it. But it really strikes a chord with me. I have a special fondness for Google. Our first Google story was Google Does Linux from August 6 in 1998. Back then nobody had heard of Google. They were doing only a few thousand searches a day... and we mentioned them not for being a good search engine... but because they had a Linux Specific search query! It was incredibly useful... I had tried to use Google before; they were making noise in the Linux world because they were a really cool application using Linux... anyway, my note in the story? "today was the first time that I successfully used Google without it crashing." What a glorious endorsement! Slashdot was only a year old. Our traffic was already pretty impressive. They were a cute upstart using cool technology to do what other search engines were already failing at. I felt a kinship: we were both based on Linux. We were doing something other places tried to do, but doing a better job.

We didn't mention Google again for like 4 months, but around then the media frenzy surrounding them began to pick up. Salon & Techweb posted stories about them that we linked to. In Feb of 99 we noted that Google goes beta. My note on this story was that "their cached version of Slashdot is from October".

By then it was clear that Google had dwarfed us. What was a secret amongst the most savy internet users was now appearing in mainstream news. We posted other Google stories after that... many of them surrounding their Linux technology. Their 4000 node Linux cluster was the stuff of Legend. They got their venture capital funding while the "Business" of Slashdot was becoming a tangible thing around me. Of course, we eventually were bought by Andover.net who went public, and they took years building what today is a pretty impressive business built on even more impressive technology.

The rest is history I guess. Google continued to explode, exceeding everyone's wildest imagination... well, except Brin & Page s'pose. Google is a cultural phenomonom, not just an internet thing, or a business thing. But I think what makes it great is not whats new about Google, but whats old about it. Their simple page design in 1998 was already throwback to the internet of years before. Mainstream websites were starting to get more and more bloated: advertisements, gifs, columns, clutter. More bling than a measely modem could handle. But Google was clean and simple... their page looked like websites did before Netscape made "Page Layout" a factor in website design. Everything else about Google may be bigger or better now, but what made them great in August of '98 continues to make them great today. I hope their IPO doesn't change that.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion