this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Antique Memes Roadshow

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Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!

Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

even at this time there were ads and sponsored links no?

[–] GlendatheGayWitch 19 points 3 months ago

I can remember a time that after a search, you'd just have a list of links. No extra boxes on the side or even an images tab, just the list of links. At the bottom of the page was the word "Google" and there would be more O's, as they were links to other pages of results.

If there were sponsored links, it didn't say so and you'd end up with different sites at the top of the list. So I don't think way back there were.

[–] marcos 7 points 3 months ago

Google brought AdSense years after that. At the time it wasn't monetized.

[–] WoahWoah 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No. This is literally 25 years ago before it was monetized.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It was running on venture capital, betting that giving away search for free would drive Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and all the others out of business, leaving Google free to monopolize and enshittify.

Luckily, it's illegal to sell products below what they cost in the United States, ~~so that didn't happen.~~

Edit: Shit. I keep forgetting when I'm posting in this timeline. We got "Cats" the CGI musical in this one, too, right?! Did we at least get the butthole version here?