this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. I would say more specifically, Google's PageRank algorithm for prioritizing results was genius because it excluded the vast oceans of word-spam sites that floated to the top of all the other search engines.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes! Thanks for reminding me. Some pages would just have a dictionary of popular words in their Metadata so if you were searching for N*Sync (shut up, it was the 90s!) you'd have to scroll through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you found anything related to what you wanted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

One only has to remember all the ‘keywords’ under a youtube video back in the day, it was a nightmare to whittle things down to what you wanted

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If we're talking "back in the day" you had to remember WHICH website you found the video on, because everyone self published, or chose one of hundreds of sites to submit their content to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You might as well be out of business if you're result comes up on the second page of Google. :)

Some comedian said that in a comedic way IIRC. It kind of stuck with me and definately holds some truth. No one clicks on the second page unless they are desperate.