Today’s Google’s 12th birthday. Short of giving Sergey and Larry the traditional “birthday spanks,” I guess we’ll have to come up with another way to celebrate.
Before Google, I found websites by category, through Yahoo! or, gasp, AOL. (Were we ever so young?) It was like a phonebook! Ah, the dark ages. The ability to text Google (4-6645) for listings info has saved me on many pre-smartphone occasions, and before Gmail? Yeesh, I don’t even like to look back on those dark days.
Bring on the cringe-inducing nostalgia, PopWatchers. In the pre-Google days, what did your Internet habits look like?
I don’t know how I would have gotten through my last month of college without Google Scholar – it saved me on many an all-nighter.
I’m 23 so Google has always been at the forefront for me. I’ve used Yahoo and Lycos and other search engines before but Google will always be number 1 for me.
Same age same philosophy (except for using bing or lycos)
I use SPYDERFYNDER to this day… tvnerd
I turned 23 on September 27th.
I remember using Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, back when it was known as that
jeeves! ah, how quickly we forget..
Haha, Ask Jeeves, that takes me back. I think that was the first search engine I ever used. I remember it being on the forefront, lol.
In college, circa 1995, I used to go to the computer lab where the only website I knew how to get to was http://www.mtv.com. There was no search engine, and frankly, I had no clue there was much out there at the time. Now I can’t live without my gmail and my google. I also use Picassa web for all my photo albums. Happy Birthday Google, you are one of my closest friends!
Yikes…I have an imaginary gun to my head, and I still can’t tell you what my homepage was before Google.
Me either!
I think mine was netscape.com! and I definitely remember using Ask Jeeves
Happy Birthday to me! {I’m 60!} Google is just a baby Happy Birthday to Google as well.Nancy Sausedo
Well Google I guess you and I share the same birthday, so from one Libra to another Happy Birthday. I turned 47 today and boy do I wish I was 12, life was more simplier.
more simplier indeed.
Play nice, Jack!
Google is the best website ever! When Google wasn’t around I would have to use a boring dictionary… I don’t know what the world would do without Google! I LOVE YOU GOOGLE!
As an English major, I shake my head in amazement. Also, somewhere out there Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert are turning in their collective English graves.
As an English major, wouldn’t you maybe want to use the word “respective” rather than “collective”? Unless there’s some mass grave for English lit figures that I’m not aware of…
t-bone… as a jerk that likes to comment on the errors made by others, are you sure you want to end your sentence with “of” ? The proper way to say that sentence would be “of which I am not aware.”
I have been using the internet since 1994 or so. I used to use infoseek guide which became go the most. Also yahoo/lycos/webcrawler were all popular back in the day. I also used ask jeeves but I can’t recall if Google was out yet when that came. When google first came out I considered it mostly for academic stuff, but over time it found more and more of what I was looking for than the other guys.
Before Google I was using Excite, Lycos, and Webcrawler. Chatting over IRC with Compuserve (competitor of AOL), and using ICQ instead of gChat… oh how times have changed.
I use my Excite email account as my main account because I want my friends who I’ve known since 1993 to know how to contact me in spite of having a dozen different phone numbers since then. If it weren’t for that, I don’t think I’d even remember the site existed.
well… happy birthday Google! if google is twelve then…… i’m just a few months older than it! Hapy birthday Google! i don’t know what i would do without it!
AltaVista and Kartoo, which doesn’t exist any more. YIKES.
I can’t believe Google’s only 12.
I’m 55 and I feel like I’ve been relying on it forever. When I think back to those wide open internet spaces its with nostalgia …. wandering in the dark and happening upon the occasional website pioneer…just sitting out there with a cabin and a fire burning…..and now….WOW! Don’t know where computing is going…I suspect lots less human interaction, less physical exertion, and less privacy. This, right now, may not be computing at it’s “best” but it might be its most fun.
What’s Gmail?
derp.
Before the Google there were spiders and AltaVista and yahoo…but Google is holding up nicely. Keep up the good work! Happy Bday!