End of Google News e-mails & look back at Google past

[trev]

It seems Google News emails are no more with the last one being sent out this morning (August 1st 2011), but this did give a chance for a bit of nostalgia about Google past.

The emails were originally sent out by Google to highlight anything new that was going on such as being able to use minus sign as a "NOT" command and using phrase searching, through to Google Buzz, Google Wave and of course Google Plus.

Citing a lack of increase in readership along with the Google Blogs, they've decided to stop sending out these emails, although not 100% sure that's a good idea as they were good reminders to go check the blogs and highlights for busy people that things were happening at Google's end.

That aside, there's an archive of the Google news which especially towards the beginning when it was being written by Larry and Serge, gives some interesting insights into how Google grew and outsmarted the competition.

For example right back in the beginning there were notices that "there will be a new crawl" although by February 1999 this had changed to continuous crawling and refreshing the data although there was still the so-called Google Dance for many years to come.

Very noticeably back in 1999 you could even email someone at Google with feedback - not something they make too easy today.

Good way to waste a couple of hours...

Trev
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[paul]

Strange that they should stop doing this. Seems a common sense way of keeping in touch with users and, even if numbers had dropped, I would still imagine the number of readers was pretty substantial and worthy of it being continued.
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