

Google user comment in 2000 - vijaydev
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.audio.car/msg/611a78e6f428e7e0?dmode=source

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petercooper
_With most other search engines, you really need to add a "+" in front of
every word in order to ensure that it's actually in the result._

How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick
of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in
front of words ensures they are actually in the results.

~~~
paulbaumgart
Completely agree. I really wish there was a way to turn off the presumptions.
Usually when I carefully craft a very specific query, I get back a bunch of
generic results unless I put in those pluses.

Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly
difficult to solve with greasemonkey...

Edit: Here's my attempt:
[http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88d...](http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88dfc9627f13aa5191b897f88d0818e0e6f54a8/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall)

Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script.

Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making
two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might
have to be its own extension...

~~~
paulbaumgart
Sorry, that link should be:
[http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/mast...](http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/master/queryenforcer.user.js/noinstall)

Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to
all search terms.

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tsestrich
I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought
was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?

~~~
blogimus
You youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No
simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally
did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did
have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever
color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the
speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow
days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert
and have to drink water through a capillary tube...

~~~
jedc
Oh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to
find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success.
That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly...

That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high
school at the time.

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simplegeek
Man, how on earth did you find this comment?

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petercooper
If you go through the USENET archives with Google Groups you can find some
_incredible_ stuff. One of my faves is digging up arguments about how much RAM
or hard drive space would exist "by the year 2000." Some people back in the
80s and 90s were nuts spouting "scientific" reasons why 512MB of RAM would be
a theoretical maximum and similar nonsense.

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philwelch
Before Google, I remember guessing relevant-sounding URL's just as often as I
remember actually using a search engine. Now if I'm looking for Volkswagen, I
don't even try vw.com, volkswagen.com, etc. etc.--I just google "Volkswagen".

~~~
prawn
And you almost have to out of fear of hitting a dodgy site. I don't think it's
as much about "before google" and "after google" as it is about how much the
landscape has changed in terms of safe browsing. I remember surfing
astalavista.box.sk without a care in the world and now I would never risk it
(assuming it even still exists).

