
Seth's Blog: Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock - pbnaidu
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/marilyn-monroe.html
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michael_dorfman
A question: back when we were all using AltaVista, did we know we needed
Google?

Or, put another way, was Catherine Deneuve the next Bridget Bardot?

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pchristensen
Because AltaVista was the least awful of the search engines. If you ever found
a good site, you had to bookmark it because you knew you'd never find it again
with a search engine.

I don't have a good actress comparison, but let's use online maps. I knew that
Mapquest was slow and ugly when I was using it, so I jumped ship (fast) to MSN
Maps, which was slightly faster and much prettier (still the best looking
maps, I'd argue). I didn't have any complaints about it - it was like Google
(the search engine) is now. When Google Maps came out, it didn't do everything
MSN Maps did but it was so much easier to use for 95% of the time that I
quickly jumped ship, again.

If something is going to beat Google, it has to change the game completely,
like the the accelerometer did for games (iPhone/Wii) or like Google Maps did
for mapping (fast live draggable views). What would that be for search? That's
the $100,000,000,000 question.

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pchristensen
Funny, Cringely just wrote about the same idea:
[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080728_0053...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080728_005308.html)

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michael_dorfman
Yes, and Cringely (oddly enough) makes the same point that I was getting at--
when we were using AltaVista, we didn't know we needed something better; it
sure seemed good enough at the time.

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pchristensen
Weird. I remember thinking of a AltaVista like a cell phone company -
necessary evil but not particularly satisfying. I remember routinely looking
through 40-50 results before I found what I was looking for and wondering why
it couldn't find what I wanted.

