Could we live without Google?

[GTO]

Obviously an extreme statement, but I am just pointing toward the convenience offered. What is data without a search facility anyways? In a single day, there are innumerable times that I need information on a topic. E.g. I needed to get in touch with a business contact but that persons numbers had changed (and different from what my records show). A google search pointed me right to him.

My browser "Opera" has the google search window built within the browser menus itself, and all I have to do is type keywords to have my query answered.

Damn, Larry Page and Sergey Brin deserve to be so rich!!

GTO

We also have a huge number of BHPians finding our community via Google.

[Steeroid]

Guess I could live without Google....cant live without TBHP

[sridhar24]

Google is the best search engine and very informative and as GTO said many bhpians must be thankful to google to find a wonderful site as Team-bhp

[MalluDude]

We COULD live without Google, but not without ANY search engine. We've become so mmuch dependent on them.

[amitoj]

One thing is for sure, if google were to cease to exist, software programmers will be the first ones to lose their jobs!!

Cheers
Amitoj

[tifosikrishna]

Originally Posted by GTO

Obviously an extreme statement, but I am just pointing toward the convenience offered. What is data without a search facility anyways? In a single day, there are innumerable times that I need information on a topic. E.g. I needed to get in touch with a business contact but that persons numbers had changed (and different from what my records show). A google search pointed me right to him.

My browser "Opera" has the google search window built within the browser menus itself, and all I have to do is type keywords to have my query answered.

Damn, Larry Page and Sergey Brin deserve to be so rich!!

GTO

We also have a huge number of BHPians finding our community via Google.

hey, its a very nice topic to discuss. GOOGLE has become an integral part of life now and its very difficult to imagine one without it.

though there is cornucopia of information available on the information super highway, google has provided us with a great opportunity to convert that information into knowledge.

Thomas friedman in his famous book "WORLD IS FLAT" has mentioned GOOGLE as one ten flatteners of the modern world and has described in detail about how it plays a important role in providing a level playing field to one and all.

thanks brin and page. on the same note, i read a recent news article about a radically new search engine developed by two indians named cosmix which promises to be much more effective than the pagerank technology , lets see how is develops.

regards
tifosi.

[ntomer]

How I wish that there was a google in real life as well, which I can find out lost keys, remote controls, papers....

\N

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by MalluDude

We COULD live without Google, but not without ANY search engine. We've become so mmuch dependent on them.

Been there, done that. When I first laid my hands on a web browser (Mosaic) on my Sun Sparc work station in early 1994, I had no access to any search engine, in fact it was a unknown concept, at least to us.

So what did we do? Most of the techies including me learnt html within hours and were passing out our URLs to each other. The web server was installed within our lan and was accessible from all over AT&T Bell Labs networks. We used it to distribute office documents, personal info, images (of all kinds...), etc. We didn't go outside of our network much since we didn't know any external websites. Once in a while somebody passed around some external IP addresses and we would all pounce on it and view the sites.

One day I saw a special IP address at some Usenet group. A search engine web site. We could search for keywords and it would list websites relevant to that keyword. I enjoyed that for a week, but somehow I lost that address. Oh man! that was bad. That's when I realised the importance of a search engine.

Few months later our browsers were replaced by something called Netscape and you wouldn't believe this, it had web search engine links available upon installation. Rest was history.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by amitoj

One thing is for sure, if google were to cease to exist, software programmers will be the first ones to lose their jobs!!

Wanna explain that? How's google connected to software programmer jobs?

[tifosikrishna]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Wanna explain that? How's google connected to software programmer jobs?

i am not a software programmer, but i have heard the same quote from some of my friends. if i am right, when they are stuck with a certain common problem or donno how to proceed on a logic, they can always find an answer with google... i think thats what he means...

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Wanna explain that? How's google connected to software programmer jobs?

Sure. Google is the biggest tool that programmers use to write code. Unspoken tenet of programming is that if there is code to be written, then its already been written by someone else. Thats where google comes in. Psst... ctrl-c ctrl-v are the most often used keys by a programmer. Specific to Indian context, when a project is "outsourced" to india, the design of the project happens in host country and the coding happens in India. In other words, the domain specific part is taken care of by host country and what generic programming techniques to use are specified to the programmers. And there are tons of examples available via google on how to implement those generic techniques.

Amitoj

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by tifosikrishna

i am not a software programmer, but i have heard the same quote from some of my friends. if i am right, when they are stuck with a certain common problem or donno how to proceed on a logic, they can always find an answer with google... i think thats what he means...

Thats the "official" reason!

[Samurai]

You kids! We programmers searched over Internet even before WWW came into existence. Ever heard of NNTP Usenet groups, which are being used even now for exchange of ideas.

BTW, I was a programmer years before I had access to email or Internet. Therefore, I don't believe software programming profession is depended on google. Besides, you can still use MSN search or yahoo search or even Usenet.

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

BTW, I was a programmer years before I had access to email or Internet. Therefore, I don't believe software programming profession is depended on google. Besides, you can still use MSN search or yahoo search or even Usenet.

:-) Am giving you the picture as of today. This is how most of the software programmers with 2 or 3 years of experience write code today. Upside is that its a much faster way of writing code but the downside is that they still claim higher person hours of effort coz their managers think they are ACTUALLY writing the code

Please note that i am referring to "software programmers" and not "software engineers" here and that too as a role and not a "job title".

Regarding Yahoo Search and MSN search, they still have a long way to go to be as good as Google's search engine.

Cheers
Amitoj

[Samurai]

Hmm, what happens to programmers who don't have access to google or Internet from work even now, say like TCS or Infosys?