Today, Google turned 10. This morning, while getting his car fixed, Harrogate watched some business show on cable news where pundits talked about how over that time Google stock and shares created multiple millionaires, and not a few billionaires either.
But setting aside the question of shares for a moment. It really is staggering when ye think about it, what a huge cultural force the Google search engine has become in such a short period of time. Doesn't it feel like it has always been with us, that we have always been able to run searches for song lyrics the second we need to know them? Or to find other things, on demand?
Thinking about Google's birthday today, Harrogate dwells a bit on human innovation, and how Harrogate himself often fails to admire the positive side of material ambition as well as the entrepreneurial spirit. Yay to information, even if you have to wade through streams of bilge sometimes, to get it.
4 comments:
Does anybody else remember what they used BEFORE Google?
I was a big "fan" of Metacrawler up until Google won me over in mid/late-1999. I even remember my friend, Capt. Happy, scoffing at me that I hadn't stepped up to the future.
I may have been introduced to Napster that same night.
Harrogate admits that he didn't get online unitl after Google was born. Indeed, he didn't get his first email account until 2001.
He was too busy being sexy to mess with such disembodied things.
I'll admit it. I once was a Yahoo user. Every once in a while I take a trip back in time...
But the feeling between us no longer exists...It's forced. It's like seeing a student you had in your class a few semesters ago that you never really knew because the student never contributed but he wants to talk about something with you just for the sake of of it...
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