We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.
Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.
> We who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know.
I do, and this is a wild exaggeration. Altavista was excellent, and there were always databases online to look up books. Google was far better than Altavista for a short time because of Pagerank, and after Pagerank was gamed was only better than the alternatives because the alternatives had shut down their crawlers.
I miss Altavista. It would be nice to be able to grep the web for things that I want to find, rather than to beg search engines to suggest something for me that they claim their research shows that I might like, but is probably just profitable for them.
Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks.
I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
"the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walk" - I think the parent's point was the impact not that the algorithm itself is unprecedented. You could argue in the same way that the wheel is just a solid symmetric disk connected to a hub in the center that helps vehicles move around on a sufficiently even surface. Note that I don't imply that PageRank is as significant an invention as the wheel.
That hasn’t changed one bit. Google made it possible to find what you’re looking for. That was literally and figuratively revolutionary. This hasn’t changed either.
Altavista was around for quite a while, and I liked its engine better than Google’s for a long time. Also, Yahoo’s directory-style thing was pretty decent if you knew your way around a catalogued library.
Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.