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days of the hard-sell internet
Friday, March 8 2002
I find it amusing, beautiful, just, and delightful that while Altavista was adding popup advertisements to its search engine, Google was kicking itself into high gear as the search engine of choice for internet users. Now I notice that Altavista has stopped launching popups (actually, it stopped launching them awhile ago). But it's too damn late; it's already stigmatized itself as the search engine which sells result placements, doesn't enumerate results, and launches malevolent popups.
Altavista wasn't always this bad. In fact, it used to be king of the search engines. I remember the good old days when there was a number next to every Altavista result telling you how relevant it was, when it displayed no ads whatsoever. Back then, Altavista was the best search engine in the business. Things started going downhill in the Fall of 1997, when I saw my first Altavista advertisement and its search algorithm was altered to make older, more-likely-to-be-broken links more relevant than younger, fresher ones.
Then, in the Fall of 1998, upstart Google arrived with a beta version of its search engine. This side project of a college student worked much better than anything a bunch of geniuses at Digital were paid six figure salaries to develop. These days, the remarkable thing about Google is that it seems to be the only commercial enterprise on the web which has figured out that linked text advertisements are worth a hell of a lot more than linked images. Do you click on images when you surf the web? I sure as hell don't. My Pavlovian fear of clicking in a bad spot is such that I don't click on images even when I'm trying to bring a background page to the front. I've had too many horrible experiences with clicking on images. Especially these days, the days of the hard-sell internet, when Morpheus sometimes spawns a page that can't be closed without resorting to control-alt-delete.
Progress on the Batcave continues apace. Today I bought a 50 ft. extension cord for $20 bucks (I had to get the expensive high-power kind) and then, coming home up President Street, I miraculously found a working Batcave-ready 19 inch Dell monitor abandoned beside some trash cans. Suddenly it was like, "Dude! I'm getting a Dell!"
This evening Gretchen and I watched Dude, Where's My Car on cable teevee. It was hilarious. Though Gretchen seemed to think the pervasive crypto-homoerotic undertones were a hoot, she was clearly disappointed when the two protagonist dudes gave their girlfriends breast-inflating necklaces in a scene near the end.
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