Do you think Google is the new AOL? Way back AOL had their homepage where you saw an AOL recommended part of the web. You still had access to the web but for most first time users it was easier to use than a web browser alone.

I say this because I’ve been wondering if we now have a Google snapshot of the web instead of AOLs homepage. Don’t get me wrong search is much better than a more or less static homepage of topics.

Are we all in a Google search bubble?

I used to work for a company making a SaaS tool for SEO teams to use to see how their site was ranking for their desired keywords on Google. This meant searching Google six million times a day from a motley crew of grey-market proxies and IPv6 providers.

We're definitely in a Google bubble. It becomes very clear that they have intense control over what shows up on the first page of searches, especially in their Featured Snippets and Carousels at the top, and their native-looking ad results.

Control over search results is incredibly powerful in terms of anything from influencing the zeitgeist, to controlling marketing efforts at a grand scale, through to straight propaganda.

We really run an incredible risk as a society by putting too many eggs into the Google basket. Using their browser to use their service to consume their results means a complete monoculture; and while they're not really visibly abusing it now, it's clear that they can subtly manipulate things for a long time before they get caught, and they have the platform to be able to do far more should they (or any government actor forcing their hand) decide they want to.

One of those "Google is the new AOL" moments hit me when I heard a commercial for Google on the radio recently. Specifically, it was someone explaining that they had a feature built especially for veterans to find jobs relevant to them, and that you could get to it by typing "jobs for veterans" into Google search.

It just sounded so much like the old AOL Keyword feature, which a lot of people forgot about, but was literally often advertised on TV or radio as how to get to a given site or web feature.

Interestingly, that was the idea I distinctly remember from the dinner party: someone suggested the only fix for Internet searches was to implement something like AOL Keywords globally. A central registry of keywords.

Realnames almost achieved that, by being added to IE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames

What would you be trying to "fix" here? More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something. If I search for a company, the company's official website is nearly always the first real result.

The only thing I think is really wrong with search (and all major search engines right now are guilty of this) is making paid ads look very similar to real results, which makes it possible to pay to hijack a result.

They're referring to a conversation in 1994. In 1994 that was definitively not the case.

> More often than not, the first result for a given query on most common search engines is the correct, authoritative source for something.

I can't remember that happening in years with Google. Now, it's unusual if the thing I'm searching for even appears in the first page.

I do not understand how you guys can call Google the new AOL, Google search works like a charm at a huge scale. What is the problem?

I think the crux of the others’ point is that Google’s increasingly complex secret sauce for returning search results, combined with its general ubiquity, has perhaps created a monoculture whereby we view the Web almost entirely through Google’s lens. AOL’s “curation” of the web via its portal was a bit more direct for sure, but I can see how the effect could be similar.

Oh believe me you can find all sorts of non curated filth as well using Google as well. I think it is still a pretty good engine for "if you insist, here is the path to rabbit hole". If you let google know about you, it will tune the results for you. I keep my history for this reason.

It’s not comparing technical merit or business decisions. AOL for a long time was the window into the web for lots of American users. Google is now a window into the web for users around the world.

Google’s algorithms have the ability to make companies essentially undiscoverable, deliberately or not, so there’s at least some comparison to be made with AOL’s keyword registry.

For me, the problem is that Google doesn't work like a charm at all. It used to, but it's been consistently getting worse over the years.

Examples? Maybe your expectations grew faster than technology to keep up?

> Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for

Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for.

Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that were only vaguely related to my search query. I don't think I ever found myself liking it much.

Yahoo was good for discovery IMHO. Yahoo + webrings + Geocities neighborhoods lead to a fun feeling of exploration I rarely feel nowadays.

I had a good experience with Altavista via the "NEAR" operator which was never fully implemented by Google (there is a wildcard "*" in Google added much later). With the NEAR operator you can find pages where terms are closer and narrow the results. Without NEAR terms can appear in discrete places of the page.

I think I switched from Hotbot to Google around 2000, maybe 2001. I told everybody I knew about the fantastic new search engine. Their plucky upstart vibe made them seem like they were carrying forward the spirit of the internet back then, before they ate the internet.

Google is interesting because it was so obviously useful that it was a barely conscious decision. Just like following a river.

Gradually they became invasive and overwhelming.. to the point that I have a slight anxiety regarding anything Google in the news.

Yeah, I had the same history. Google worked better than keyword search because the web was young and naive and not built by evil spammers yet, and people had not figured out how to game PageRank. That lasted a few years. Now it is mush again.

For a long time I used yahoo. The nice thing with a directory is that if you found an interesting website you could look up similar websites in the same yahoo category. I think this functionality is just gone.

Are there any sites with a "crowdsourced" directory? Might be interesting to have something like wiki-pedia that is a curated source, but curated by a larger group of volunteers. Although, I could see it getting corrupted by marketing purposes, but at the same time it might be able to be maintained cheaply by a foundation. Human intelligence providing grouped sites might be a useful asset, and there could be statistics/requirements for getting listed.

You can check-out http://www.curlie.org/ , which is the successor of DMoz, the volunteer-powered now-defunct Directory of Mozilla project.

There used to be dmoz.org, r.i.p. It doesn't seem to be working anymore, but it used to at least have an archive.

A mirror of the archive still exists: https://dmoztools.net/

I know it's a bit of a fashion here to bash Google but so many Google products still 'spark joy' in my life. Maps, GMail Search, Photos, Translate, Speech Recognition etc.