Happy 15th birthday, Google. What would we do without you?
Google’s 15 years old. For some of us who can remember the search giant becoming a Big Deal, that means we’re a lot older than we used to be.
Still, this adolescent is more accomplished than your average teen. They’ve completely changed the face of the internet - which, lest you forget, used to kind of suck.
Imagine if Google just … vanished, a la It’s a Wonderful Life. Here’s what we’d be stuck with.
Before Google entered the chat market, it looked a little like this:
Good christ, the memories. Every five minutes xxx~~ChristineBubbles88~~xxx would pop up with her ridiculous profile photo reminding you of that time you met that never happened.
We could still be stuck in that hell, people.
Many of us are chained to a desk these days, answering emails all day. You know the way Gmail threads all of your conversations neatly?
Yeah, well they used to be individual emails for every reply - remember?
The inbox might as well have been labelled ‘pile of stuff I’ll never look at’.
Before online editing in Google Docs, most of us typed away happily on our desktop machines (and if you’re still doing this - don’t!). The sensation of finishing a long document went something like this:
Whew. Finally got that essay finished after six hours of typing in Microsoft Word 98. Now, I’ll just—
Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu...
Google Maps is still mind-blowing. I mean, in my pocket, I have a world atlas that knows where I am, how to get me anywhere on the planet, and can show me what the street looks like.
Before, you’d get directions from Joe. This is what Joe’s maps looked like:
Useless.
Oh, you want to find an image? Here’s a Geocities webpage that contains your keyword once with several hundred flashing images. Maybe it’s one of those.
Seriously, whatever wizardry Google uses to know what an image looks like, it’s magic.
This is what search engines used to be like, back in the days when they were ‘portals’ that never delivered any good results.
That’s all.
People tend to forget the Google own the Android operating system.
So, without that, we’d all be using iPhones (which have robbed a fair few ideas from Android, by the way) or whatever Nokia was making the past few years. Or Windows Phone.
Thank Christ.
Google Scholar - which searches academic articles - meant college looked like this:
• Decide my opinion
• Write most of essay
• Use Google Scholar the day before deadline to find quotes that support whatever you wrote, what book they’re in, on what page.
• Find them on college’s database and copy-paste them in.
I love you, Google Scholar.
Time was, being connected on the information superhighway wasn’t all that useful for seeing what was on the other side of the planet - because they wrote in a different language.
Google Translate has been around since 2001. It wasn’t very good, but after they hired an expert in translation from US Department of Defence think-tank DARPA, it got a lot better.
Now, you can buy that weird thing from Japan by reading a kind-of understandable page. You can sort-of read French and Spanish news. Sure, it ain’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn amazing - just don’t use it for schoolwork or business.
What a wonderful life it is.
