twenty years ago there was a big to-do all about this new website called Ask Jeeves. back then, if you wanted to search the web, you used yahoo search, and back then, search indexing was SHIT
if you didn’t use the exact correct phrasing in your query, you didn’t find anything you wanted. and this was hard for humans to handle, because we’re used to asking questions, not parsing pieces of information into the most efficient phrases that will relate to larger banks of information
i was 8. i still read zoobooks. yahoo search was both dazzling and monumentally frustrating to me
so the thing about askjeeves.com was… you ask the search engine a question, and it uses algorithms to interpret your query to gather information, and respond to you in a human way. it was groundbreaking
two years later, google hit the web. i still remember being in the computer lab doing a research project and having a teacher tell me, “try this new search engine, its better than yahoo”
im telling you this because i know there are kids who were born into the age of Google… how good it got and how fast
because back then, search indexing still fucking SUCKED. back then there were people you knew who were “good at google” because you still needed to plug in the right words to find the right pages
today, i could reach into my pocket and pull out a device that both sees and hears me, and slur into the microphone “when was the sun born” and google will deliver me its age and all the theories and information surrounding the creation of our solar system
thats a lot of power to have. and when its that easy to get answers i want the comfort of knowing that you’re all taking the time to ask questions
This actually does work