I remember the bad old days when Google searches mostly returned adult nasties, Amazon and Ebay listings.
They’ve developed astonishingly sophisticated algorithms since then. It’s my number one resource. It’s where my business lives, as well as a good chunk of my social life and leisure time. Now that Google is thirteen years old, I find it hard to remember what life was like without it.
What was life like before Google?
Before t’internet, ‘shopping’ meant trudging the high street and trawling through cumbersome mail order catalogues. If you needed to research something you’d visit the reference library or ask an expert by landline or letter or in person. If you wanted to get in touch with a friend you used your home phone, met up, found a call box or wrote a letter. We spent hours, if not days, completely out of touch with world events except for the papers, telly and radio. And we didn’t touch base with friends anywhere near as often.
Look back and you realise how profoundly things have changed. The business landscape is unrecognisable. And our personal lives are utterly different from the olden days – not even twenty years ago – when we didn’t have the wonderful world wide web in our homes.
So happy birthday to Google. Here’s to the next thirteen years of good stuff. I’m looking forward to watching the SEO industry second-guessing Google’s algorithms so I can keep on applying their findings to your freelance copywriting projects!
