I stopped using Google search a month or so back. It had been worthless for a while but I just never bothered to try something else. This video explains why and how Google search became so shitty.
I don’t know what –if anything– can or will replace Google search but realizing the results it give you are shit is half the battle.
I’ve previously posted about creating a Gmail account in 2004. Google launched the service on April 1st of that year and I created my account (invite-only at the time) on April 21, 2004. In those 20+ years I accumulated more than fifteen thousand emails. Google’s pitch was their search was so good you could just keep all of your emails and they’d help you find it. And it worked pretty much as advertised. But I rarely needed to find an old email. And my ALL MAIL folder just got bigger and bigger. If memory serves, I downloaded all/most of my Google stuff a couple of times during those 20 years but never had a need to use those backups.
Most of my computing these days happens on my iPhone and my MacBook. But given my lengthy history with Google (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar), I’ve never migrated over to Apple for these tools. Until now.
I was very impressed with Apple’s approach to AI (“Apple Intelligence”) and to get the full benefit I’ve decided to go all-in. Starting tomorrow I’ll be using Apple Mail and Calendar. Not sure yet about switching from Google Drive to iCloud. I have a lot of files in Google Drive (850 GB).
As for deleting 20+ years of emails? Felt great. If I experience any regrets, I promise to update this post.
First, a bit of history: Google Video was a free video hosting service launched on January 25, 2005. It allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on other websites. I seem to recall putting videos online before that but they were nasty little things about the size of a matchbook and took hours to create and upload. (Google Video made it SO much easier.) YouTube launched in February 2005 and was acquired by Google in October of 2006 ($1.65 billion in stock). Google shut down Google Videos in 2009.
I uploaded my first video to YouTube in February of 2006. In the ensuing 16 years I’ve uploaded 551 videos. It never occurred to me to “monetize” my videos so I’ve never paid much attention to the analytical data YouTube sends me every month. YouTube was just an easy way to stream videos using their embed code on my blog.
Today they sent my “2022 snapshot.” In the past 12 months my channel has had 53,000 views (50,000 “watch time minutes”). Over the course of the 16 years my videos have been viewed 1,066,666 times. And I’m not even trying (to influence or monetize).
In May of 2004 I received an invitation to beta test Google’s new email service, Gmail. Google had acquired Blogger in early 2003 and sent invites to users. We were allowed to invite two friends. As I recall, people were selling such invitations. It was early enough that I was able to get “stevemays@gmail.com”
For reasons unimportant, yesterday I created a second Gmail account, my first ever. I decided to use the name of a character from one of my favorite novels. I searched for more than half an hour, picking the most minor and obscure characters I could think of, and never found one that wasn’t taken. I finally gave up and went for nonsense: poontangmeringue@gmail.com. And decided I didn’t really need a second account after all.
Google says they have 1.5 billion active Gmail users. I’m a little surprised poontangmeringue was still available.
Google Docs launched in June, 2006 and Google Drive didn’t come along until April of 2012. (I’ve always been a little fuzzy about the Docs and Drive) I’ve found docs going back to 2010 and I put everything in Google Drive. Today stumbled on a feature I hadn’t seen before.
If you put sub-heads in a Google Doc, you can scroll to those headings with the little scroll button in the iOS app. Just pull the little button to the left. Very handy on a long document.
It is fashionable of late to bash Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon et al. There’s plenty to complain about I suppose (and I’ve done my share) but after the fire has been peed on and the dogs have been summoned, I really like Apple, Google and Amazon (I’ve never used Facebook). I like them a lot. Do I like everything they do? Of course not.
But this post is about Google Calendar. I’ve been using it for years. Anything of importance, anything I want to find later… goes into Google Calendar. Case in point: I’m in the process of switching health insurance companies and today I got a call from a representative of the new company, checking on one of the drugs I take. He also asked about a drug I didn’t recognize and said it was a one-time script on February 4, 2014. I had Google Calendar open so I hit the “G” key and typed in that date.
That was the day I hit some black ice and slid off the highway, getting just banged up enough that Barb insisted I get checked out at the ER. They gave me a muscle relaxant as I recall. Here’s a screenshot of that entry.
Note the link to my blog post on the event as well as links to PDF scans of the towing receipt; a summary from the ER visit; and a couple of insurance documents. Four years ago and I had it all from a 5 second search.
Is Google doing something with all of my data? I assume so. But I never see ads an they don’t charge me a dime. I call that a good deal.
It’s that scene where all the seniors are gathered at the high school hangout, just before everyone heads off to college or the Army or a full-time job at Wal Mart. Everyone promises to keep in touch but knows they won’t. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made on Google+. I got in the car or on a plane to go meet some of you f2f.
But like everyone else, I could see this coming. I’m guessing a lot of folks will swing over to FB and reassemble there. Not an option for me. In fact, this was my last little toe-in-the-social media-water. I’ve been spending time one a Land Rover forum and feel comfortable with the focused/moderated environment. No politics, no ranting… just guys talking about their trucks.
I guess I’m still a little surprised nobody has figured out a way to do a paid social media platform. Sure seems like there would be a lot (okay, enough) people willing to pay, say, twenty bucks a year for an ad-free site. But no such thing exists as far as I know.
“Google today announced an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative to over 16 additional school districts, giving “thousands” of students access to Wi-Fi and Chromebooks on their buses. […] Google contributes mobile Wi-Fi routers, data plans, and Chromebook devices. Each Rolling Study Hall also has an “onboard educator” who’s able to provide direct assistance.”
Just over a year ago Google presented WaveNet, a new deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms that is capable of producing better and more realistic-sounding speech than existing techniques. It’s gotten a LOT better and is now capable of producing natural sounding human voices.
Google is using it for Google Assistant but hard for an old radio guy like me not to imagine this tech replacing radio announcers (are there still radio announcers?)