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Thursday, April 29, 2004
Cultural Amnesia: Google Didn't Invent Search, People
For the next year or so, I suppose we'll now have to resign ourselves to hastily-written glosses on info-retrieval "then and now" -- with the "now" being the Book of Google and "then" being mere pre-history.
Check this out:
"Information before Google was a tough and often dull business before Stanford graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with an algorithm that searched and ranked Web pages on the basis of "importance" value to determine their usefulness.
"Students trudged to libraries, journalists rifled through dog-eared contacts books and computer neophytes struggled with search engines that required precision spelling, hyphens and slashes in the right order."
I hope Danny Sullivan has some fun with that one in his monthly newsletter.
Precision spelling! Like spelling things correctly! Imagine that! And imagine "trudging" to a library. (I really hope students still do that, even if it's only to fire up Google or make out in the stacks.)
Also, she misspelled the word "wacky" in the story. Kooky.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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