Google search is 25 years old - what else do we use now?

I don’t use anything else these days, but is anyone not using Google at all?

I rarely navigate straight to Google now - I just type question into browser search/URL bar - so search is whatever that browser is tied into - it's usually Google though! 🙂

I don't use google if it can be possibly avoided.  Duck duck go as search engine.  I am logged out of google stuff permanently on all my stuff.   Its astonishing how pervasive google is and how hard to avoid

google maps is the one thing I do use sometimes

Google still king for me.

Was talking about this with a mate the other day as we tried to remember when we'd been on a particular holiday (in the pre-Google era...)

Both bemoaned the fact that Google hadn't managed that part of our lives! 😂

My two young nieces were watching one of the early Harry Potter films where he's in the library researching something and the younger one said "why can't he just Google it?" They've grown up with that resource. 🤷🏻‍♂️

After hearing about all the clever things they've been doing I've been trying Bing recently . . . it's still utter shit, misses more than it hits. Straight back to Google

crazy - legs - To be fair google is very good, so you can't really blame the kids personally it rarely fails and I normally get what I need.

Hang on @DickBarton, I knew I'd seen this post before. Are you a PCD?

Google for shopping and duckduckgo for information

I'm afraid I've sold my soul to Google.  Contacts, Calendar (shared with family members), maps on Android auto, I use a Chromebook running Chrome OS and use their browser on my PC and (Google Pixel) phone.  The house is filled with Google Nest smart speakers. If we've run out of milk I'll ask Google to stick it on my Google shopping list. Google translate, Google wallet, Google password manager etc. etc.

Not proud of it and It wasn't a conscious decision, it happened gradually but because everything integrates so well across devices and with other family members it just works really well and does make my life easier.  I feel slightly uneasy that I'm in so deep with such a massive corporation, but it doesn't keep me awake at night.

Google used to be great at finding what you were looking for with the treat of the occasional bit of associated porn.  Now it's mainly only good for finding shops with a vague association for the search criteria.

It's all I use though because I'm institutionalised.

Just google for me. Google maps when traveling for car nav, but use bing maps when planning rides occasionally as it has the OS layer.

I use google pretty much exclusively. Id be screwed if it went down.

They have my emails, calendar, travel information, all my personal details. I have their hardware (many nest speakers and displays as well as phones etc) and software everywhere.

Yes they know everything about me but so what. the user experience is great (generally, they dont tend to bugfix their smart home stuff very well)

Google here as it works very well.

I love Google - it makes picking up tasks, remembering passwords, saving browsing history, putting your apps back on a new phone, generally doing things on multiple devices so much easier.

I don't really use Google drive though - MS One Drive for all my work stuff

I'm a Google fan maping is very good for my work.

But brave and duckduckgo are my go-to along with Firefox.

Use Google for pretty much all my home "admin"; calendar for family stuff, email, photo storage, Casting from phone to telly, and so on. I've an i-phone that uses apple maps in the car,  but that's it really.

We use Google accounts for everything at work so I'm fully engrained in it. To be fair it works beautifully.

I've got a Google phone, millions of baby photos in Photos and I'm considering a Google doorbell.

When they reveal their true intentions and turn on us it's all over.

Google everything here too.

It did go down sometime in 2022, notable as it's very rare.

As above, yes they know a lot about me. But they offer a very good, reliable and slick service.

I was at college when I first heard the word Google. Was just disucssing it in the office, some people here have never known a world before Google, no altavista or Ask Jeeves. Or even a world without internet connectvity!

I’m afraid I’ve sold my soul to Google. Contacts, Calendar (shared with family members), maps on Android auto, I use a Chromebook running Chrome OS and use their browser on my PC and (Google Pixel) phone. The house is filled with Google Nest smart speakers. If we’ve run out of milk I’ll ask Google to stick it on my Google shopping list. Google translate, Google wallet, Google password manager etc. etc.

Not proud of it and It wasn’t a conscious decision, it happened gradually but because everything integrates so well across devices and with other family members it just works really well and does make my life easier. I feel slightly uneasy that I’m in so deep with such a massive corporation, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night.

Only live once, may as well make it as easy as possible vs wearing a foil hat. My company uses Ecosia - a "green" search engine. Walking to a library would produce quicker and more accurate results.

The browser I use on my Ipad gives a choice of a bunch of search engines. I usually use Google. Or Duckduckgo if I'm feeling particularly paranoid (hardly ever). It's not logged into my Google account anyway... Oh man, I have a Google account. My life is not my own.

I don't find Ecosia too bad. its just a greenwashed Bing though in the backend. I'll drop back to google if there's anything important to look for.

Just Google - expect when I use Bing Maps for satellite view.

Q: Where's the best place to hide a body?

A:The second page of google search results.

I use google pretty much exclusively. Id be screwed if it went down.

Yep, same here.
Google phone, Chromebook, Google Pay, Google Photos...

At the moment it's a fairly benign overlord although I suspect it'll turn out to be the new Skynet at some point... 😉

Remember when  getting a gmail account was invite only?

I was pretty chuffed when I got one, with my proper name, through an invite from a colleague

Google almost exclusively aside os map layer on bing maps. On top of that, dabble  with Google Analytics & Looker Studio for work too

I have my actual name @gmail.com   - No numbers, nothing - early invite as well - shows how old i am

Give Google one thing - unlike Bing, the google search homepage isn't stuffed with clickbait.

Bing's image result for "Google has eaten my soul"

For search, I default to DuckDuckGo, but then try Google if it's tricky.

Google search is definitely getting worse, year on year tho. Sometimes ChatGPT et al are better (eg when I finished Anna Karenina and wanted to know what some common takes on X or Y were. It was good at summarising popular opinions).

I also use Reddit if I want to get opinions on stuff. I trust it more than many of the SEO-ed top results on Google.

But as an Android user it's not like I actively avoid Google. I've been on Gmail since 2008, it knows my whole life.

I have my actual name @gmail.com   – No numbers, nothing – early invite as well – shows how old i am

Heh, same!

Give Google one thing – unlike Bing, the google search homepage isn’t stuffed with clickbait.

Maybe not the homepage, but the results pages certainly are ...

I’ve sold my soul to Google.

me too, remembering the days of "don't be evil", as in don't exploit your users like other tech companies do. Hmmmm.

I utterly depend on google in many areas of life, though have an iphone for work which I consider an unfortunate if necessary unpleasantness. I much prefer the google ecosystem, but searches have become a real pain in recent years (including on maps), getting past the ads and inflated rankings being a total pain, and I do occasionally use other search engines in frustration.

I use Bing mostly.

I've never quite understood the criticisms - I always find what I'm looking for - and it seems to have far fewer ads.

Also, if I'm going to sell my should I'd rather sell it to Gates than Page and Brin

@DickBarton

I first read about Google in Nature (or maybe, Science) and I remember showing it your Dad on his weekly visit to caress our IT kit.

Google transformed my work as a semi-research librarian / PA looking for obscure scientific publications.  Until that point it was Excite or trawling CDs from the British Library.

Google is all I use now.

Until that point it was Excite

jesus christ excite! Or webcrawler? Alta vista? Ya bleedin hoo? Puts the annoyance of a page or two of ads and suspicion some of the good stuff is buried pages down into perspective. Kids these days don't know they're born!

@StirlingCrispin, aye, he mentioned a new search engine back then...I'd already heard about it but at the time, the results weren't as good (think it was very very early days when I found it - and then promptly discarded it as it wasn't great). Finance Director though - every morning he'd come in and report the top 5 search finds he'd had in Google for a month...oh it was grim.

@lunge, afraid I'm clearly thick as I'm stumped with what a PCD is in this case, however, I don't think I am...

jesus christ excite!

The company that could've bought Google for buttons, but didn't as it was too good at bringing up the correct result (and therefore taking people away from the adverts)

CZ to the forum.

I use Google. It works, so long as you're not looking for anything on STW.

I  use Duck Duck Go.... Except more often than not, the first thing I type into it is !guk which instructs it to do a Google search 🤣

I just like having the option of Google not be the default.

I don't think Google is all that great at returning results for more nuanced searches. It's extremely populist (which I suppose is understandable) which means isn't as easy uncovering hidden corners of the internet (for example small personal websites tun by enthusiasts) as it used to be.  I miss the random stuff that used to crop up!

I use Google. It works, so long as you’re not looking for anything on STW.

Well - that's obviously the fault of Google - ruddy amateurs! STW code is fine! 🙂

@DickBarton

I think I know! I think I know what a PDC is. I think he's implying you're on repeat!

PDC:  programme delivery control: a system for starting and stopping a video recording automatically, using special signals broadcast at the beginning and end of a television programme.

Ha! Thank you Google!

I use Google. It works, so long as you’re not looking for anything on STW.

Works ok from Google itself. Looking on STW for anything on STW is as good as it ever was.

Forget Skynet, they just won the Lasker prize (think Medicine American Nobel prize) for their AlphaFold work on folding proteins. When it becomes a verb, it's ingrained. When it moves to small 'g', there is no going back. I use it but deliberately scroll past the "sponsored" hits.

When it becomes a verb, it’s ingrained. When it moves to small ‘g’, there is no going back.

Tell that to Elon Musk!

He spent $44bn on a website for which 'tweet' was a verb in the dictionary and.... promptly changed its name 😆

I just type question into browser search/URL bar

I used to work with someone who'd type Google into the URL bar, then click on the top link (obvs to Google) and then type whatever they were looking for into the Google home page. I tried explaining that they could just type the query straight into the url bar, but nope they always did it their way.

I used to work with someone who’d type Google into the URL bar, then click on the top link (obvs to Google) and then type whatever they were looking for into the Google home page

Apparently one of the absolute top searches on Bing is "Google".

Walking to a library would produce quicker and more accurate results.

The world before google (well, internet searching for info) and mobile phones.....kind of hard to remember.

From academic research to the everyday. Especially the every day. Meeting friends at a predetermined time and place that you couldn't change once you'd all left your landlines (how long did you wait before someone was MIA?), to go to an event where you couldn't double check when it opened/closed and navigating your way there with an A-Z.

Apparently one of the absolute top searches on Bing is “Google”.

I'd expect that to be right behind "download chrome" 😁

To be fair to Edge it's come a long way, I use it in work and have no complaints these days.

Bing still isn't great but then Google isn't either, the amount of utter dross you have to wade through means I often just give up these days. It can't even match a quoted sentence so what's the point?

As for Google as a company, never underestimate their willingness to just pull the plug on something regardless of how much has been invested in it. If the search engine started flagging I have no doubt they would absolutely pull the plug in an instant with no backup. They just canned Domains with absolutely no warning or reasoning (but at least offered a migration deal for existing customers).

I remember when WebCrawler and then Lycos launched. Then about a year later, AltaVista was an absolute revelation. I think I used that until Google came along. Set up my domain for the family on Google Apps for Domains as it was called then, now Google Workspace, and managed not to get kicked off last year when they suddenly decided all of us legacy non-commercial customers should pay for it, after promising it would be free forever. Not sure if I'll be able to leave the domain and the Workspace account in my will though, or even if the kids would have any idea what to do with it.

To be fair to Edge it’s come a long way, I use it in work and have no complaints these days.

That's because they threw the towel in and just repackage Chrome's rendering engine in a crappy MS interface! IE/Edge was still doing non standard html stuff only no one tested websites anymore against it, so it never worked properly. MS was still stuck in the days of 20 years ago when IE was the dominant browser and if they decided to do something non standard, everyone had to just follow them. Now people just check websites against Chrome and no one give a shit about MS browsers. Hence MS was forced to cave.

Still use google, though I got a lot more wary of it once I started working with SEO and realised how much of it is basically a scam. (highlight: discovering that if you searched for a specific university course that only my place offered, and included out university's name in the search query, we were on the second page of results behind a load of universities that had no equivalent course, but who had a decent SEO budget)

But is it just me or has it recently got drastically worse? Shopping seems to have been hived off into another thing, now I have "products" instead which just doesn't really work, it throws me a list of brands, and getting hits <without> shopping seems way reduced. Like, I just did a sample search and apart from "related searches" all of the top hits were a shop link, while the first information link was about 15th or 16th. So it's like I simultaneously have a general search that's crap because it's full of shopping links, but also searching for products is also worse.

Maybe I'll go back to infoseek 🙁

I remember when WebCrawler and then Lycos launched. Then about a year later, AltaVista was an absolute revelation.

Netscape for us at uni.
That was the first time I'd properly used the internet and email, 1997 arriving at university. 😳

Bits and pieces at school but it was so locked down and there was so little to actually access that it was near pointless.

I remember having to get a Yahoo email address when I did my year in industry in 1999/2000. It was a choice between Yahoo and Hotmail back then.

But is it just me or has it recently got drastically worse? Shopping seems to have been hived off into another thing, now I have “products” instead which just doesn’t really work

I have noticed that Google doesn't seem to work very well recently for shopping. Used to be excellent, but just doesn't seem to offer really obvious sites which sell that product any more.

I don’t use anything else these days, but is anyone not using Google at all?

Actually in the last year for quite a number of things, all work related. ChatGTP sees a lot of use.

Kinda depends what it is Im looking for.

Hence MS was forced to cave.

Which might look like justice to anyone in a  company they put out of business in the earlier browser wars.

(Remember now I heard of Google from a guy called doug who did bmj's website of the week column, who said it's what all the cool kids were using. And it was pretty cool, changed how I worked.)

I just use edge. Seems to work.
I still have to use Internet Explorer for one work task. Each time I open it I need to close down the window in edge to make it work.
Used to use Firefox, but I'm logged into MS for work so that makes moving stuff around easier. I have my Google account for MyMaps on the laptop but I'm not allowed it on my work phone or tablet.

For mapping I use Google MyMaps, grid reference finder, open street map and bing maps. The aerial view between Google, bing and GRF varied depending on where you're looking, if ones crap the other may be good.
Bing also has the OS maps but their street view is gash.

I wish the favourites ribbon would give me a better symbol for bing maps.

I still have the Google app, but all of the browsers I use; Brave, Safari, Firefox, Ghostery Dawn, have DuckDuckGo set as default search, and I have the DuckDuckGo app as well.

I’ve also got an AI app installed, Perplexity, and while I don’t use it very often, when I have it’s returned nicely phrased speech-like answers.

We have Edge at work. It’ll be staying that way for me.

I had to Google Duck Duck Go as I've never heard of it!

I went through a phase of trying out Lougel, but it never got me anywhere 😉

Can't believe none of you nostalgia folks have mentioned Dogpile!  That was the power move IMO, before Google blew everyone else away...

Another one with a full name on my Gmail account from the days when invites were being very generously handed out on here. Even so I still get communications meant for blokes with the same name. One, a drama lecturer at a local university, the other a golf-playing member of an antidiluvian university fraternity in the US. I use google.

I used to work with someone who’d type Google into the URL bar, then click on the top link (obvs to Google) and then type whatever they were looking for into the Google home page. I tried explaining that they could just type the query straight into the url bar, but nope they always did it their way.

Aargh that reminds me, I knew someone who did the same but even more so: if you told them to go to "www.whatever.com" they'd go to Google and type the full address www and all into Google... now where's that disproportionate anger thread gone?

Edit: hmm, I tried it out of curiosity, seems like www.whatever.com leads to clicking the subscribe button on someone's stupid Youtube account. How annoying.

Dumb? Or smart? If they misspelt it, Google would still show them a link to the site (probably buried under a load of paid for ads for competitors of the site they're after, but hey).

Just completely computer illiterate and didn't know how browsers worked, I think. Watching it was like nails on a chalkboard. Tried to explain once but that went nowhere.

I went through a phase of trying out Lougel, but it never got me anywhere 😉

Try it in a hot tub.

if you told them to go to “www.whatever.com” they’d go to Google and type the full address www and all into Google

I've done that plenty of times.  I've even googled Google 😆

Can’t believe none of you nostalgia folks have mentioned Dogpile! That was the power move IMO, before Google blew everyone else away…

I used Dogpile. It was my go-to before Google came along. It wasn't a search engine in its own right, it aggregated everyone else's results.

As far as nostalgia goes, I'm here from when a "search engine" was a fanfold printout that someone from the year above accidentally left on a desk. (I might still have one somewhere.)

I’ve even googled Google

Google "recursion" 😁

I might still have one somewhere.

Seems I do.

Google is so much better than anything else imo. I find it hard to believe, from a professional point of view, that they have managed to stay so far in front, for so long.

A while ago, I spent a fair bit of time in China. There is no Google available in China (and no Facebook or YouTube). Of course there are other search engines. But it’s amazing how much I missed a simple, effective google search.

Google is now 25 years old...

Leonardo Di Caprio has announced he's switching to Bing.

As seen on Twitter yesterday 🙂

I'm feeling very old. In a pub in Manchester and lots of the patrons are clearly younger than Google.

Try it in a hot tub.

Some kind of time machine would probably be useful too 😉

Google is actually not very good for me lately. I try to search for something specific, and it overwhelms my results with things only vaguely related to what I was looking at. Oh, you want to know how to release the ball joint on a 2019 Nissan Leaf? Here's how you can do it on a 1979 Datsun Cherry, that'll help you! Lots of other people have enjoyed that video!

@Cougar I know what Cheeseplant's house was.

I had to Google Duck Duck Go as I’ve never heard of it!

😳 It’s DuckDuckGo, no spaces. And it’s been around for ages! Since 2008, in fact, and I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it, it’s regularly recommended as an alternative to Google, because of its emphasis on privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

There’s another browser popped up for iOS, and I think Android, called Vivaldi. I’ve installed it on my iPad, but not my iPhone, yet; that’s undergoing a very long-winded restoration from iCloud backup. 🥱😴