Wow, I feel fucking old as hell. I remember when this was true and it's what differentiated Google from the others.
Other search engines it was like page three, but Google had the right link, first choice, a lot of the time. Maybe you'd get down to the fourth or fifth link.
They took over the market, then adopted every bad practice that set them apart (SEO notwithstanding).
I also remember when you could tell people "It's the third link down." Because everyone would get the same results. Type this phrase into Google, these are the results you get.
It can be confidently argued that the western American empire and it's related industries (software and the Internet included) peaked in the 90s. We had a bit of hang time at the top and now it's been free fall since around 2004.
I ran Linux in 2004, and it was great, but it was such a "second-class citizen" desktop OS. The fact that Unreal Tournament and sequels actually worked on Linux felt amazing because it was such a break from the norm, whereas now gaming on Linux is actually a viable option.
Maybe you could flash the ROM on your phone in 2004, but afaik nowhere near the vibrant community you have now.
And self hosting then kinda meant, "I have an Apache server and IRC daemon listening" (the irony is that the self hosting community is so good now in part because of enshittification).
Programmable microcontrollers --- with freely available, to ust IDE+libraries --- are literally the price of a nice cup of coffee (3x ESP32 can be had for $14 on Amazon). How cool is that!?
I think there's a lot of shitty stuff out there, and the shitty stuff probably outnumbers the cool stuff --- but there's world full of really, really cool stuff out there.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
It’s crazy that the “I’m feeling lucky” button still exists, I probably haven’t clicked it in 20 years (though I’ve been using DDG for like the last five).
That looks a lot like the textbook I got in University (which I started in '99). I can't remember if it mentioned Google for sure, though. Yahoo and I think Alta-Vista were in there, along with things like Archie, Gopher, etc.
I can remember a time that after a search, you'd just have a list of links. No extra boxes on the side or even an images tab, just the list of links. At the bottom of the page was the word "Google" and there would be more O's, as they were links to other pages of results.
If there were sponsored links, it didn't say so and you'd end up with different sites at the top of the list. So I don't think way back there were.
It was running on venture capital, betting that giving away search for free would drive Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and all the others out of business, leaving Google free to monopolize and enshittify.
Luckily, it's illegal to sell products below what they cost in the United States, so that didn't happen.
Edit: Shit. I keep forgetting when I'm posting in this timeline. We got "Cats" the CGI musical in this one, too, right?! Did we at least get the butthole version here?